Ether and most other altcoins also drop amid more bad news for the global economy.
Crypto prices sagged on Monday, a national U.S. holiday honoring civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., and showed few signs of reversing any time soon.
Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, fell below $42,000, although at the time of publication it was above that mark. Ether dropped under $3,200, while most of the other leading altcoins stayed in the red.
Equity markets were shuttered on the holiday, offering a respite from the recent drumbeat of bad news that seems to be increasingly intertwined with crypto pricing. The Wall Street Journal reported that about 220 U.S. publicly traded companies with market capitalizations over $10 billion have fallen 20% from their peaks and that the S&P 500 and Nasdaq had declined 2.2% and 4.8%, respectively.
Meanwhile, a New York Times story highlighted the inability of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to keep pace with data about the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, which has been hammering the global economy.
Pankaj Balani, CEO of the crypto derivatives exchange Delta Exchange, said that bitcoin is vulnerable to falling further because buying demand is absent. “We are not seeing any bottom fishing at these levels, and the interest to own bitcoin risk around $40,000 remains low,” Balani told in a WhatsApp chat. “We could retest $40,000 and should that break, we can see a fresh round of selling come through.”