Crypto Today: Bitcoin slumps below $10K

• Bitcoin erased more than $1500 in the last few hours.
• Ether is down more than 10% on the day.
• Total market cap falls below $300 billion.

The BTC/USD pair came under a heavy selling pressure in the US afternoon and refreshed its three-day low at $9000 as it lost over $2000 in one hour. This sharp fall seems to be an over-due technical correction as no fundamental catalysts were present. After today's record-setting rally, all the momentum indicators for the pair was showing extreme overbought conditions in short-term charts. As of writing, the pair was at $9500, down 4% on the day. Impacted by bitcoin's drop, the ETH/USD pair also turned negative on the day and was last seen trading at $413, down 12% on the day. 

The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies, which reached an all-time high at $345 billion today, dropped to $290 billion, suggesting that investors are liquidating their positions and moving away from the market. Despite the drop below the critical $10K mark, however, bitcoin remains the most dominant digital currency, taking up 55% of the total trading volume.

Joseph Stiglitz, the former chief economist of the World Bank and currently a professor at Columbia University, talked about digital currencies in an interview on Bloomberg TV on Wednesday.

"Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention, lack of oversight," Stiglitz said and further added, "it’s a bubble that’s going to give a lot of people a lot of exciting times as it rides up and then goes down. The value of a bitcoin today is expectations of what the bitcoin is going to be tomorrow."