El Salvador's Bitcoin Legal Tender Introduction Sees Cryptocurrency Drop 17% on First Day

Ethereum down 14%·Dogecoin down 19%
Technical error in El Salvador digital wallet
"September is usually a slow season for cryptocurrencies"

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Suhwan] On the first day that El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, major cryptocurrency prices plummeted by about 17%.

According to CoinDesk on the 8th (local time), the price of Bitcoin is currently $46,746, down 9.94% compared to 24 hours earlier.

Bitcoin's price fell as much as 17% that day, dropping to the $43,000 range, but later rebounded to recover to the $46,000 range.

Ethereum is also trading at $3,369, down 14.57%.

Dogecoin is trading at 24.8 cents, down 19.16%, and Cardano is trading at $2.35, down 17.18%.

According to 'Bybt', a cryptocurrency futures trading platform, over the past 24 hours, about 336,000 traders liquidated their cryptocurrency accounts, resulting in approximately $3.6 billion worth of Bitcoin sales.

On that day, expectations for El Salvador's world-first adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender led many cryptocurrency investors to buy, pushing Bitcoin's price to the $52,000 range.

However, from the first day, a technical error occurred in 'Chivo', the Bitcoin payment digital wallet issued by the El Salvador government, causing the server to be down for several hours, and Bitcoin's price plummeted again from noon that day.

This decline was the largest drop since the end of July. Cryptocurrencies had risen 75% since the end of July until now.

Experts pointed out that September is typically a correction period for cryptocurrencies, analyzing that the Bitcoin downtrend could become more pronounced.

According to Bloomberg News, Bitcoin has fallen by an average of more than 6% in September over the past six years.