Bitcoin briefly fell below $ 40,000 on Monday, the lowest since late September, suffering in the first sessions of 2022 from a lack of risk appetite from investors worried regarding the Fed tightening monetary policy.
At around 3:10 p.m. GMT on Monday, the price of the cryptocurrency fell 3.3% to around $ 40,900, half an hour following hitting a September low of $ 39,663.18.
Since the start of the year, bitcoin has lost almost 12% of its value.
The first cryptocurrency had benefited at the end of 2020 and in 2021 from the flow of liquidity that watered the markets due to the ultra-flexible monetary policy of the US Federal Reserve.
The prospect of a hardening of the latter, to counter inflation, weighs on the contrary on bitcoin, as on the world stock markets.
“The shares of technology groups, which are particularly sensitive to the outlook for rate hikes, are under pressure,” notes Fiona Cincotta, analyst at City Index.
Some investors also consider that a quality of bitcoin, its supply limited by the algorithm that regulates its issuance, makes it a safe haven once morest inflation, a kind of digital gold, which would therefore be less attractive if the Fed acts .
Next meeting for the market: US inflation figures on Friday.
“If the published data exceeds market expectations, we can expect even more sales of bitcoin, because investors calculate that the higher the inflation, the faster the Fed will have to act,” summarizes Marcus Sotiriou, analyst at the cryptocurrency broker GlobalBlock.
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