A sell-off sent the ethereum price plunging below $300 on Monday, forcing the second-largest cryptocurrency to its lowest mark in more than nine months.
Ethereum had traded as high as $323 earlier in the day, but a flurry of sell orders began to pummel the market at approximately 15:00 UTC, driving ETH closer and closer to $300, a level it had not touched since 2017.
Notably, this decline has not just occurred against the dollar, as the ethereum price has also cratered against bitcoin. Just six months ago, ETH was valued at just under 0.1 BTC. Now, its priced at less than half that mark and shows no signs of finding its footing as bitcoin continues to gobble up market share. At a present value of 0.047, ETH/BTC is now trading at levels not seen since mid-December, when the bitcoin price went parabolic and briefly peaked at $19,891 on Bitfinex. Its not entirely clear what drove the sell-off, which is disproportionately large compared to the minor declines exhibited throughout the majority of the rest of the cryptocurrency market.
Now we are below $200, no one thought that this was possible but this is where we are right now, no one knows why ethereum is declining so rapidly but there are a couple of theories but the one that I most believe is that someone is manipulating the price of the coin to make sure that they are buying the coins at a really cheap price.