The cryptocurrency selloff has accelerated on Tuesday with the market experiencing heavy declines across the board again.
At the time of writing there is just a single coin in positive territory amongst the top 100 coins as investors hit the sell button in a hurry.
The sea of red has led to the entire value of the crypto market falling to US$193.2 billion according to Coin Market Cap.
This is the lowest value of the entire market since November of last year and means it has lost 6% of its value since this morning and a massive 11.5% over the last 24 hours.
From its peak of approximately US$839 billion in January, the market has fallen a whopping 77%.
While Bitcoin (BTC) will take the headlines with its 6.3% decline to US$6,065.65, the declines have been significantly bigger among the alt coins.
Ethereum (ETH) has been the worst performing major coin over the last 24 hours with a massive 17.8% decline to US$264.51. This leaves the world's second-largest cryptocurrency trading within sight of its 52-week low. As well as being caught up in the selloff, concerns over the impact that a significant drop in ICOs will have on demand has weighed on sentiment.
The rest of the top five have performed almost as bad. Ripple (XRP) is down 14.7%, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is down 15.4%, and Stellar (XLM) is 10.2%.
The latter coin has risen into the top five because of a heavy fall from EOS (EOS). The EOS price is down 14.5% over the period, knocking its market capitalisation to a level just a touch lower than XLM.
Rounding off the top ten, Litecoin (LTC) is down 14.4% to US$51.43, US-dollar pegged crypto Tether (USDT) is down 0.8%, Cardano (ADA) has plunged 19.3% to 9.24 U.S. cents, and Monero (XMR) is off 11.5% to US$85.06.
What happened?
Sentiment has been negative of late after the potential launch of a Bitcoin or crypto ETF in the near future became increasingly unlikely.
This latest decline could be further panic selling as FOMO quickly turns into FONGO, but some experts have suggested that Turkey's currency crisis could be partly to blame.
However, this has been dismissed by James Quinn, head of markets for blockchain company Kenetic. He told Bloomberg that: "Correlations historically have been extremely low between cryptocurrencies and other asset classes."
Whatever the cause, I'm not convinced the rout is over. As a result, I would suggest readers resist buying the dip and stay well clear of the market for the time being.
