Bitcoin has plummeted over the last week, falling sharply by 10% since mid-May as some early adopters reveal they think they’ve spotted bitcoin’s successor.
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The bitcoin price, still languishing after its 40% crash from $126,000 per bitcoin in October last year, is quietly braced for a crypto market game-changer.
Now, as Elon Musk’s $1.4 billion secret bitcoin stash rocks the market, billionaire investor Mark Cuban has suddenly flipped, fueling fresh bitcoin price crash fears.
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Cuban, known for both the Shark Tank investor panel show and once saying he’d rather have bananas than bitcoin, has sold off the bitcoin he revealed he held during the Covid era, saying the cryptocurrency had "lost the plot" due to its failure to act as an inflation hedge.
“When all this shit hit the fan with the Iran war ... well, gold just blew up... bitcoin dropped," Cuban told former footballer and podcaster Brandon Marshall. “And every time the dollar dropped, bitcoin should've gone up ... and it just didn't do that.”
Bitcoin has, however, added around 25% since the U.S. and Israel first struck Iran in February, while gold has dropped by just over 10%.
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Cuban said that he’s “more disappointed in bitcoin, not as disappointed in ethereum," branding non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and memecoins “garbage.”
In 2021, Cuban told the Delphi Podcast that his crypto portfolio was "60% bitcoin, 30% ethereum and 10% the rest," claiming in a now-deleted X post that he had "never sold" since beginning to experiment with Coinbase in 2012.
The bitcoin price rally stalling has raised fears among bitcoin and crypto market watchers that the brief bitcoin price rally could be about to mirror the 2022 crash that saw bitcoin double-dip.
“Bitcoin has reached a major bear market resistance level, the 200-day moving average at $82,400 following a 37% price rally from the April lows," analysts with CryptoQuant said in an emailed note.
“The parallel with March 2022 is direct: in that cycle, bitcoin also rallied 43% before hitting the 200-day MA, after which the price resumed its downward trend. The current setup raises the question of whether history repeats.”