Crypto Market Drops Alongside Stocks on Global Worries; Australian Spot Bitcoin ETF Set for Debut

cryptonews.com:

The crypto market initially traded lower on Monday, before trimming its losses later in the trading day as sentiment improved. The market action came after heavy selling before the weekend on comments from US Federal Reserve (Fed) Chairman Jerome Powell last week, hinting that a 50-basis point rate hike could come next.

As of Monday at 14:40 UTC, bitcoin (BTC) stood at USD 39,304, unchanged for the past 24 hours and down 1% for the past 7 days. At the same time, ethereum (ETH) was down by 1% in a day and down 3% in a week.

The move down last week followed comments from Fed Chair Powell on Thursday, saying with regards to interest rate hikes that “it is appropriate in my view to be moving a little more quickly.”

The comments hit both crypto and traditional markets hard, with the broad S&P 500 stock index falling by close to 2.8% on Friday, and continuing to decline Monday morning EST time. Similarly, BTC and major altcoins also fell hard on Friday, with the declines continuing in the crypto market through the weekend.

Commenting on the market action on Monday, crypto broker GlobalBlock’s analyst Marcus Sotiriou said the USD 40,000 level for BTC now is failing after the Fed signaled that more aggressive action is needed to stem inflation.

“It is clear that the Federal Reserve have taken this aggressive stance due to consumers in the US are still spending substantially, which comes as a surprise after the Russia-Ukraine war,” Sotiriou said.

Still, the analyst said that he remains “cautiously bullish,” since the 50-basis point rate hike was already expected by the market, which he said means it has “already been priced in to a large extent.”

“This could lead to a buy-the-fact event on the day of the [Fed] meeting on 3rd-4th May,”