Today, on may 10, the price of the first cryptocurrency suddenly fell below the $9000 mark, interrupting the uptrend. At the time of writing, BTC is trading around $8,600.

The chart below shows that the sharp decline in price was accompanied by a significant surge in trading volumes:

In just 30 minutes, the price of BTC dropped by 10%. Against the background of what is happening, the Coinbase exchange briefly went offline.

According to the service Rek.to, the volume of liquidations on the popular crypto-derivative exchange BitMEX against the background of the collapse of the price almost reached $300 million.

The sharp drop in the price of BTC occurred on the eve of halving the reward for the block, which is less than two days away.

"By tradition," the first cryptocurrency pulled down almost the entire rest of the market. This is what the top ten CoinMarketCap looks like at the time of writing:

As you can see in the screenshot, the vast majority of crypto assets have sunk by more than 10% over the past day.

The total market capitalization is at $236 billion, and the BTC dominance index is 66.9%.

Opinions in the crypto community about the impact of the upcoming halving are ambiguous. So, early bitcoin investor Charlie Shrem is sure that the half-payment of the reward for the block mined by miners is a positive signal for digital gold, the effect of which, however, will not immediately manifest.

Specialists of the analytical platform Santiment have a completely different opinion, which recently predicted the sales of major players against the background of hype around halving.