Major cryptocurrencies plunged into the red on Friday morning as the crypto market continues its volatility since last week’s massive sell-off.
Bitcoin (BTC-USD) fell back below $40,000 (£28,195) during the session, trading 4.9% lower to $36,708.
The world’s second most popular crypto, ethereum (ETH-USD) crashed over 7% to $2.549, while dogecoin (DOGE) slumped 7% to $0.31.
It comes after influential fund manager Cathie Wood — the founder of Ark Investment Management — blamed the crypto crash on the “ESG movement.”
Speaking to Coindesk’s Consensus 2021 conference, Wood said ESG (environmental, social and governance) concerns over Bitcoin’s energy use, exacerbated by Tesla (TSLA) boss Elon Musk, had put a lot of institutional buying “on pause.”
Despite that, Wood provided a message of reassurance, saying the top cryptocurrency, bitcoin, is “already on its way and it’ll be impossible to shut it down.”
The environmental impact of cryptos has been a source of much concern lately and North American bitcoin miners are working to bring transparency to their energy consumption, through the Bitcoin Mining Council.
Prior to that, Musk sparked a sell-off after saying the electric carmaker was abandoning plans to accept bitcoin as payment due to environmental concerns.
On Thursday, Iran announced it was banning the energy-consuming mining of cryptocurrencies after some of its cities experienced blackouts. This was possibly due to a drought that had affected hydro-electric power generation but cryptocurrency was draining more than 2GW from its grid each day, the country said.
“Bitcoin’s energy consumption, and in particular, the percentage of power coming from renewable energies, has been the source of a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt lately, so seeing mining companies volunteering to report publicly on this is a good thing, as long as they don’t try to force any changes to the protocol without first reaching broad consensus across the entire network,” said Mati Greenspan, CEO and founder of Quantumeconomics.io.
Blockchain-based tokens suffered several price dives last week in response to talk of a crackdown in China and tweets by Musk.
On Friday, Chinese vice-premier Liu Hu said China would “severely crack down on illegal securities activities and severely punish illegal financial activities.”
The volatility shaved billions off the wider crypto world’s value after deep correction hit the market. The global crypto market lost 13.3% over the last 24-hours, according to data provider CoinMarketCap.
– Yahoo Finance