Meanwhile, Ethereum the second-largest cryptocurrency in the world has shed 6% and Solana plummeted 7% on Friday.
Another piece of news that negatively affected the cryptocurrency market was the Kazakhstan president’s move to shut down internet service in the country. The decision came amid deadly protests against the government.
Kazakhstan’s Bitcoin network processing power stands at 18% of the total global power, according to data from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. After China banned cryptocurrencies mining in the country, crypto miners fled to neighboring countries such as Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan’s internet shutdown took as much as 15% of the network offline, according to some estimates.
Bitcoin’s computing power “is not directly correlated to the price of Bitcoin, but it gives an indication of the network’s security, so a fall can spook investors in the short term,” Marcus Sotiriou, an analyst at U.K.-based digital asset broker GlobalBlock, said in a note Thursday.
