INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Bitcoin had earlier touched an all time high of $69,000 on November10 .Hong Kong: Bitcoin hovered around $49,000 on Monday, down 1.5% on the
day, as traders nursed losses after a brutal weekend in which the price of the world's largest digital asset at one point lost over one
fifth of its value.The rout sent bitcoin's price and the amount invested in bitcoin futures back to where they were in early October,
a hard month; we aren't seeing the strength in bitcoin that we generally see after one of these crushing days, leverage markets have been
completely reset, and open interest within leverage markets has completely reset," said Matt Dibb, Chief Operating Officer of
Stackfunds.Crypto data platform Coinglass showed open interest - the total number of futures contracts held by market participants at the
end of the trading day - across all exchanges was last at $16.5 billion compared with $23.5 billion on Thursday, and as much as $27 billion
on November 10.Traders said the weekend fall was connected with the broad move away from riskier assets in traditional markets over worries
about the omicron variant of the new coronavirus, combined with lower trading liquidity.As prices fell further, investors who had bought
bitcoin on margin saw exchanges close their positions, causing a cascade of selling
A range of retail-focused exchanges closed more than $2 billion of long bitcoin positions on Saturday, according to Coinglass.Some exchanges
allow traders to place bets 20 times or more the size of their investment, meaning a small move in the wrong direction can cause exchanges
to liquidate clients' positions when their initial investment is gone.Bitcoin rival ether, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency,
which underpins the ethereum network, was also hit on Saturday, but less hard.It last traded at $4,112, versus its November 10 high of
$4,868, but it has climbed steadily on its larger rival.One ether last bought 0.086 bitcoin, its highest since May 2018.(This story has not
been edited by TheIndianSubcontinent staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
