By ALAN SUDERMAN, Associated Press
The price of bitcoin fell below $90,000 and other cryptocurrencies saw large drops Tuesday morning, erasing some of the gains digital assets have made since President Donald Trump took office on a pro-crypto agenda.
Bitcoin, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, was trading at about $89,000 as the U.S. stock market opened. That’s down from about $106,000, which was the price around Trump’s inauguration. The decline in bitcoin and other crypto assets accelerated after a report showed a bigger-than-expected drop in consumer confidence for this month.
Cryptocurrency is highly volatile, and prices can change rapidly. Even with Tuesday’s drop, bitcoin is still up significantly since Trump won last year’s election. Supporters said the price drops represent a good investment opportunity.
“Buy the dips!!!” Eric Trump, the president’s son, said on the social media platform X. He replaced the letter B with the symbol for bitcoin.
It’s been a mixed bag for the cryptocurrency industry in recent weeks. The president and pro-crypto members of Congress have promised to usher in a golden age for the industry and pledged quick action to craft friendly regulations. And in recent weeks, regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission have signaled plans to drop enforcement actions against key industry players, like Coinbase and Robinhood.
But a large hack of a major cryptocurrency exchange — one of the biggest thefts of all time — and a major scandal involving the president of Argentina and a meme coin have highlighted some of the vulnerabilities in a relatively still nascent industry.
Last week the Dubai-based cryptocurrency exchange Bybit announced it was a victim of a sophisticated hack that stole about $1.5 billion worth of digital currency. A number of security researchers believe North Korea, which authorities have blamed for several other major crypto hacks, was behind the theft.
Argentine President Javier Milei is facing a corruption probe into his promotion of a meme coin, called LIBRA, whose price soared then quickly crashed after Milei posted about it on X. Milei has distanced himself from the meme coin and denied any wrongdoing.
Meme coins are a highly speculative form of cryptocurrency that are mostly minted as jokes and have no intrinsic value but can sometimes soar in price.
One of the crypto developers involved in the LIBRA coin said meme coins are essentially a rigged game that benefits a small group of people at the expense of retail investors in a recent interview with an independent journalist.
That developer, Hayden Davis, also revealed he was involved in the launch of First Lady Melania Trump’s meme coin just before her husband took office. The Melania meme coin was trading at about 90 cents on Tuesday, down from more than $13 when it first launched. The president also helped launch a meme coin just before he took office that’s seen a similar price trajectory.
Solana, a major cryptocurrency that’s a key player in the meme coin ecosystem, has seen its price roughly cut in half since Trump’s inauguration.
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