The crypto market has continued to decline since Ethereum started to enter the consolidation.

According to the OKX market, BTC approached the $18,000 mark yesterday, falling as low as $18,235, the lowest level in the past three months; ETH briefly fell below $1,300, falling as low as $1,280, the lowest price in nearly two months. Other altcoins also followed suit to varying degrees.

As of press time, BTC and ETH are quoted at $19,209 and $1,350, respectively.

Rewind the time to a month ago. After BTC fell below $20,000 on August 28, the market has been in turmoil. On September 7, the shock ended and the downward trend started again. Bitcoin once fell below the $19,000 mark, and the lowest price of the day was $18,505. The decline of Bitcoin also led to the decline of many mainstream currencies and altcoins. The mainstream currencies that had been rising all the way when Bitcoin was in shock before were oversold. On September 7, ETH fell to 1485 USDT at the lowest, 7.55% on the 24th, and fell as much as 11% at the highest point. The remaining mainstream currencies and various DeFi tokens generally fell by around 7%.

At this time, there is still a week before the merger of ETH 2.0, and the market generally bets on the success of the merger of ETH 2.0. Therefore, after the market experienced a short-term decline, it soon ushered in a rising market. Before the Ethereum merger, BTC rose about 20%, hitting a three-week high, and the market ushered in a small rebound. ETH is also up around 10%, breaking out of its highest point since September. A large number of early DeFi leading projects began to rise again, led by AAVE, CRV, LINK, etc., and their rising pace was consistent with the merger of ETH 2.0.

But the good times don't last long,With the disclosure of CPI data, investors began to wait and see。

On September 13, the US announced that the August CPI was 8.3%, which was lower than the 8.1% expected by the market. Shortly after the release of worse-than-expected macroeconomic data, U.S. stocks also fell, with technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index futures falling 3.6%.

The cryptocurrency market also adjusted accordingly, and the BTC rebound began to slow down. After a brief recovery to $22,800, it began to fall sharply, erasing the gains of the previous 3 days.

At this time, the positive expectations of the merger of Ethereum in the circle cannot resist the macro trend. Although in the early stage of the merger, many investors hoarded some ETH in anticipation of the airdrop of forked coins, but at the same time, the market has a strong force to short ETH hedging. The funding rate of the EHTUSDT perpetual contract on Binance once hit 14 The fund utilization rate on Aave also reached 100% at one point.

After the merger was successfully carried out, perhaps because investors saw that the situation was as stable as expected, they closed their short orders one after another. The funding rate of the Binance ETHUSDT perpetual contract has been adjusted from nearly -0.5% before the merger to -0.24%; Aave The ETH lent on the platform has also been returned after the merger is completed, and the utilization rate of funds has dropped to below 75%. at this timeThe merger is good and the popularity of forked coins subsides, and the ETH spot market is also facing certain selling pressure. Some investors sold the spot, and the price of ETH in the market fell all the way.

at this time,"PoS cryptocurrency may be recognized as a security subject to federal securities regulations" remarks add a trace of panic, the entire crypto market began to fall again.

According to data from Coin on September 19, a total of US$1.55 billion was liquidated across the network in the past 24 hours, and a total of 190,000 people became victims of liquidation, with the largest single liquidation reaching US$150 million. Affected by this, the market value of the entire encryption market has also shrunk by more than 30 billion US dollars in the past 2 days.

The emergence of extreme market conditions also caused a MakerDAO treasury to face the liquidation risk of about 3.3 million DAI debts when the ETH price was about 1284.684 US dollars (fortunately, there was no breakdown).

Looking at today (September 20), ETH has fallen by 28% since the end of the merger, falling as low as $1,280. BTC is down around 20%, with both hitting recent lows on Sept. 19.

Faced with such a market situation, community users complained: ETH became a worse version of Cardano overnight... It turns out that the merger is the merger of my wallet and others...

In response, Riyad Carey, a research analyst at encryption data company Kaiko, said: "The sudden price crash looks like a "buy the rumour, sell the fact" reaction. We are seeing a decrease in market depth and an increase in spreads, which could lead to greater price impact.”

Regarding the future market of Crypto, whether it will fall endlessly or rebound strongly, different institutions also hold polarized attitudes.

McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, said: "Fed actions will continue to dampen investor sentiment, BTC, ETH and the broader crypto industry may see further market carnage, ETH may fall to $ 1,000, or even lower .”

(Odaily Note: Coinciding with the Federal Reserve rate hike meeting, the market generally expects officials to discuss raising the benchmark interest rate by 75 basis points for the third consecutive time, and the possibility of raising interest rates by 100 basis points is expected to be 25%. Although no specific Data, but investor trading sentiment has been frustrated, today's panic and greed index is 23, the level is still extremely panic.)

The representative of the optimist, Matthew Sigel, head of digital asset research at VanEck, said: "It is clear that after the merger of ETH 2.0, those in the market are making commitments and locking in liquidity. It continues over time, so I think the early results are pretty encouraging despite the price action."

However, the mainstream currency market has long been unable to be independent of the global economic situation. Therefore, we are more pessimistic, that is, it will be difficult for mainstream currencies to soar back to historical highs in the next few months. Investors should, as always, maintain confidence while operating cautiously and reduce lever.