Cryptocurrencies fell on Thursday. Bitcoin (BTC) fell below $25,000, while XRP and Cardano's ada (ADA) extended declines in 24 hours to 7.4%. The total market capitalization lost 3.8% in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinGecko.

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Further declines are expected and some traders indicated that bitcoin could drop as low as $23,500 based on analysis of price charts.

“Bitcoin has retreated to local resistance levels from August last year to February this year,” said Alex Kuptsikevich, senior market analyst at trading firm FxPro, in an email to CoinDesk. “The bulls may try to maintain selling near this level, but the current decline is still within the descending channel that has been in place since April.”

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A descending channel refers to a bearish trend in any asset marked by prices generating lower highs on short-term time frames.

“A more significant support level for bitcoin is near the 200-day moving average which is now at $23.6K and pointing higher,” Kuptsikevich added.

ADA's drop means it is down more than 20% in the last week after being classified, along with 12 other tokens, as a security in a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). of the United States against the cryptocurrency exchanges Binance and Coinbase.

XRP erased all gains from a rally earlier this week after markets learned of “Hinman emails” from a Ripple Labs presentation on Tuesday. The emails from William Hinman, former head of the Corporate Finance Division of the SEC, were made public in connection with the SEC's lawsuit against Ripple.

For its part, ether (ETH) registered a 6.4% drop in 24 hours, while ether futures had the largest liquidations among the main cryptocurrencies, with US$57 million of a total of US$143 million in all futures about cryptocurrencies.

Liquidations refer to the moment when an exchange forcibly closes a trader's leveraged position due to the total or partial loss of that trader's initial margin. It happens when a trader cannot meet the margin requirements for a leveraged position, that is, they do not have enough funds to keep the trade open. Major sell-offs can indicate the peak or trough of a strong price movement, allowing traders to position themselves accordingly.

Market sentiment was affected by an overall bearish sentiment and an unusual amount of selling of the tether (USDT) stablecoin on the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Curve Finance.

USDT balances in Curve's popular 3pool — a stablecoin trading pool comprised of USDT, USDC, and DAI — surged to more than 72% early Thursday, suggesting traders had exchanged tens of millions of USDT for USD coin (USDC) and dai (DAI).

Article edited by Sheldon Reback and translated by Natalia Paulovsky.