Investing.com - Bitcoin was trading at $47,465 by 08:30 GMT on the Investing.com Index on Saturday, down 16% on the day. It was the largest one-day percentage loss since September 7.
Also, Ethereum, Solana, Cardano and Ripple XRP plunge double digit percentages. The two meme tokens Dogecoin and Shiba Inu crashed as well.
Within minutes, Bitcoin went down by around $7,400 - a flash crash that is not that unusual in the volatile world of cryptocurrencies, but is still causing a stir.
The Alt coins also suffered heavy losses.
Ethereum (-13.3%), Binance Coin (-12.5%) and Solana (-16.3%) all posted double-digit percentage losses. In the wake of the sharp losses of the top 5 cryptocurrencies, Cardano (-17.5%), Ripple XRP (-21%), Polkadot (-21.5%) and Avalanche (-12.9%) also fell hard.
According to data from Coinglass (formerly Bybt), positions worth around $1.6 billion have been liquidated in the past four hours, around 40 percent of them in BTC.
77.7 percent of bitcoin closeouts in the past four hours were long. In total, positions valued at $2.5 billion were liquidated in the past 24 hours, of which approximately 85% were long positions.
The crypto market has lost a good $ 550 billion in market capitalization to just $1.88 trillion at around 7:20am GMT, before recovering to $2.2 trillion dollars at time of writing.
BTC fell as low as $42,587, its lowest level since September 30, clearing any stop losses that were just below the all-important 200-day moving average at $46,253 before recovering.
The move downwards pushed Bitcoin's market cap down to $896.13B, or 40.92% of the total cryptocurrency market cap. At its highest, Bitcoin's market cap was $1,275.5B.
Bitcoin had traded in a range of $42,587.8 to $53,847.2 in the previous twenty-four hours.
Over the past seven days, Bitcoin has seen a drop in value, as it lost 13.32%. The volume of Bitcoin traded in the twenty-four hours to time of writing was $58.8B or 26.87% of the total volume of all cryptocurrencies. It has traded in a range of $42,587.8 to $59,174.4492 in the past 7 days.
At its current price, Bitcoin is still down 31.2% from its all-time high of $68,990.63 set on November 10.
Elsewhere in cryptocurrency trading
Ethereum was last at $3952.97 on the Investing.com Index, down 13.3% on the day.
SHIBA INU was last at $0.0000358 on the Investing.com Index, down 14.1% on the day.
Binance Coin was trading at $543.33 on the Investing.com Index, a loss of 12.5%.
Ethereum's market cap was last at $467.4B or 20.3% of the total cryptocurrency market cap, while Binance Coin's market cap totaled $90.4B or 4.00% of the total cryptocurrency market value.