Bitcoin, the heavyweight champ of crypto by market cap, has been on a three-day skid, dipping 2% in the last 24 hours to trade at $27,575 as of now, May 9, 2023. The slide kicked off on May 6 when BTC was lounging around $29,700, dragging its market cap down from $575 billion to $533 billion.
That’s in lockstep with the broader crypto market, which has seen its total cap shrink from $1.2 trillion to $1.13 trillion over the same stretch, per crypto.news data.
Here’s the twist: even as prices dip, the number of Bitcoin addresses holding any amount of coin just hit a new all-time high—46,476,720, according to Glassnode. More folks are clutching BTC than ever, but it’s not enough to stop the bleed. Maybe they’re betting on a long-term rebound, or maybe they just can’t stomach selling at a loss. Either way, the growing crowd hasn’t translated to price support.
Adding spice to the mix, a May 8 report flagged a weird hiccup on the Bitcoin network—a sudden chain fork that led to a double-spend of about 10 BTC. It happened just hours before Binance flipped the switch back on for BTC withdrawals after a one-hour congestion snag. The fork-double-spend combo sounds messy, but details are thin, and it’s unclear if it’s rattling investor nerves or just a blip in the blockchain’s day.
