By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 20th, 2024
The price of Bitcoin has fallen to its lowest value in five months as uncertainty surrounding the cryptocurrency’s future in China continues.
Today, on 10th of April, the price of Bitcoin experienced a sharp decline causing it’s value to fall below the $400 per-coin mark. At the moment, the bitcoin price is floating around $388.
That’s a big difference comparing to the value of the last 52-weeks, at that time the price was around $1,132 (Bitcoin Average).
This big drop has affected almost all major cryptocurrencies, resulting in a wide instability across market.
This is the lowest bitcoin price that has been seen on the CoinDesk since last November. The reason behind such a big change is that the uncertainty of the digital currency’s future, caused by Chinese government, continues.
Major Chinese bitcoin exchanges received notices that their bank accounts would be shut down by banking partners. As a result, the initial decrease in value happened after the announcements made by BTCTrade.com, which was then followed by Huobi and BTC100.org.
According to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index, bitcoin’s value dropped by 15% just in one day and amounted to $385.32 (£229.40) on Thursday.
The news from both BTCTrade and BTC100 repeats the requirements that were assigned by Chinese government to all banks in the country. The banks were forced to freeze bitcoin based accounts operated by bitcoin exchanges by April 15.
Coindesk states that China-based exchanges have alternative ways to move money in and out of exchanges without use of their bank accounts. The channels include pre-paid cards and vouchers or the access via third-party payment processors.
According to the CoinDesk CNY BPI, the price went from ¥2,726 to ¥2,490 within five hours of the announcement.
After reaching ¥2,248, the price fluctuated over the next 10 hours, reaching highest point at ¥2,531 at 8:30 UTC. Then, the price began to fall at approximately 14:30 UTC, slipping from ¥2,508 to ¥2,424 over the next 45 minutes.
NAB Says ‘No Thank You’ to Digital Currencies
After a conducted internal review the major considerations regarding all the risks that cryptocurrency involves were taken into account. As a result, National Australia Bank (NAB) has decided to stop operations of digital currencies, announcing to their business customers that all the accounts holding any cryptocurrency will be closed on May 2.
Even though NAB has never traded in cryptocurrencies, noticed that the risks are too big.
CoinJar, Australia’s major Bitcoin trader, said that the decision made by NAB will affect a big number of local companies.
Asher Tan, CoinJar co-founder, said that NAB had at least provided plenty of notice.
“We have done this before; we transitioned from another banking partner in 2013 in a much shorter timeframe,” Mr Tan said.