Crypto markets feel the pain of war as Russia invades Ukrainian Territory

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On thursday Bitcoin took a sharp fall to lows of $34,200 due to uncertainty in the world economy. The crypto market has followed traditional financial markets as the situation in Ukraine escalates to war. Altcoins also took a heavy hit, with most recording losses in excess of 10%. $200 billion was wiped from the crypto market cap as a result.

In the uncertain week leading up to the invasion, Bitcoin’s price fluctuated a lot, which means we could now be testing an important support level of USD 37,400, but only if momentum indicators continue to deteriorate, which doesn’t seem to be the case, as prices have gone back up to 38.872 at this time of writing.

If bitcoin trades below this support level for several days, a further drop of nearly 30 percent could follow. Bitcoin could then drop to about $27,000, analyst Stockton of Fairlead Strategies wrote in a report this week.

Ruud Feltkamp, CEO of crypto trading bot Cryptohopper, said “First of all, I would like to say that I am shocked by the attack on Ukraine. My thoughts go out to the residents and the Cryptohopper colleagues there. I find it unimaginable that this can still happen in 2022.

I’ve been closely watching the markets for a while and was very curious how the Bitcoin price would react to this. I honestly think it’s doing pretty ok. Regardless of the war, I expected a slight move down anyway, after which another $40k retest is expected. Whether this will still happen is, of course, the question.”

On Tuesday, bitcoin fell to a level of $ 36,500, but then bounced back. On Wednesday morning, bitcoin traded again at nearly $39,000 again.

Anto Paroian, Chief Operating Officer at digital asset investment fund ARK36, says,The prospect of geopolitical escalation has been the main driver of price moves in the broader risk asset spectrum for the past couple of weeks. Now that the war between Russia and Ukraine has become reality, investors are rushing to take risk off the table and stock markets globally are seeing major declines. Given how closely the crypto markets have been correlated with risk assets over the past two months, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the situation is aggressively spilling into the crypto markets with Bitcoin losing more than 8% in a day.

It is tempting to think that Bitcoin and other crypto assets may count on some relief from central banks in the form of a more dovish approach to rate hikes and quantitative tightening. The rationale behind it would be that the economy will now become too fragile to be taken off central banks’ support just yet.

However, the current geopolitical situation will inevitably have an effect on the already elevated prices in the commodities market and aggravate the already-serious supply chain issues which, in turn, could elevate inflation. This means that the Fed and other central banks may really have no room to reverse their hawkish course and we can expect risk assets and cryptocurrencies to go deeper into the bear market territory.”

Experts have also been speculating that Russia might use Bitcoin to evade Western sanctions preparing to brush away some the worst effects by making deals with anyone around the world willing to work with them. And are also saying that those entities can then use digital currencies to bypass the banks that governments rely on.

This could be very negative for the general perception of cryptocurrency as it would give Western governments more legitimacy to crack down on digital assets.