(Kitco News) - The reservations that many had against being exposed to the market ahead of today’s Jackson Hole summit have proven to be well warranted as hawkish comments from Fed Chair Jerome Powell sent asset prices across global financial markets tumbling on Friday.
At the time of writing, the S&P 500 has fallen by 2.15% on the day, while the Dow and NASDAQ have declined by 1.85% and 2.57%, respectively, while the vast majority of cryptocurrencies in the top 100 are now in the red for the day.
Daily cryptocurrency market performance. Source: Coin360
Data from TradingView shows that the Bitcoin (BTC) price experienced a whipsaw effect following Powell’s comments, initially spiking from $21,130 to a daily high of $21,895, only to plummet by more than 6.22% to hit a daily low of $20,530.
BTC/USD 1-hour chart. Source: TradingView
This outcome was not entirely unexpected for Kitco Crypto readers, as Kitco Senior Market Analyst Jim Wyckoff warned of the possibility of a downturn in his morning Bitcoin brief on Friday.
“Bears have the slight overall near-term technical advantage. The recent pause has produced a “collapse in volatility,” which suggests a bigger price move is on the horizon. Technical odds slightly favor that move being to the downside. Market prices tend to vacillate between periods of higher volatility and periods of lower volatility, and some higher volatility is now due,” Wyckoff warned.
Ether falls despite the Merge hype
The top altcoin Ethereum (ETH) has been the talk of the town in recent weeks as its transition to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, known as the Merge, looks on track to complete on or around September 15th.
It appears as though the building hype wasn’t enough to shield Ether from J. Powell’s comments, as the smart contract platform saw its token price do a similar whipsaw move to hit a daily low of $1,565, and is currently down 7.3% on the 24-hour chart.
ETH/USD 1-hour chart. Source: TradingView
Data from CoinMarketCap shows that out of the top 200 tokens, only a handful of coins have managed to put on a gain amid the widespread downturn.
The biggest gainer over the past 24 hours was Braintrust (BTRST), which climbed 10.74% to a price of $2.11, followed by a 5.3% increase for Conflux (CFX) and a 5.3% rise in the price of Tribe (TRIBE).
The overall cryptocurrency market cap now stands at $999 billion, and Bitcoin’s dominance rate is 39.7%.
