Bitcoin Slides Below $121K as Gold and Silver Rallies Take Breathers

An attempted bitcoin (BTC) rally back toward a record high was quickly snuffed out and reversed in morning U.S. action on Thursday.

Trading just below $124,000 just ahead of the opening of the stock market, bitcoin pulled back to below $121,000 about ninety minutes later. The action happened alongside pullbacks in previously red-hot gold and silver markets.

Gold has been making most of the headlines of late, but the action in silver may have been today's driver. Up 50% from the April lows, the metal hit $50 per ounce for the first time ever on Thursday. That level, though, spurred some fast profit-taking, with the price dropping about 4% within minutes. At press time, silver was changing hands at $48.55.

“Near term, momentum looks choppy as technicals flag an increasingly overbought market; medium term, appetite to sustain ranges above $50 should persist if the macro and real-yield picture stays benign,” wrote Daniela Sabin Hathorn, senior market analyst at Capital.com.

For its part, gold reversed more than 1% from a challenge of the $4,100 per ounce level to the current $4,035.

The ongoing U.S. government shutdown may also be starting to weigh on investor sentiment, disrupting the release of key economic data and slowing operations for businesses that rely on federal services, clouding both traditional and digital asset markets.

Altcoins bleed against BTC

Smaller cryptocurrencies fared worse during the pullback: ether slumped 3.5% to $4,300, while BNB and DOGE also fell 3%-4%.

Amidst the risk-off move, bitcoin's market share of the total crypto market climbed to its strongest reading in nearly eight weeks The Bitcoin Dominance metric rose above 59.4% for the first time since August, TradingView data shows, suggesting traders rotate capital back to the largest crypto asset.

The pullback rippled across crypto derivatives markets as well. Over $600 million leveraged trading positions were liquidated across all digital asset in the past 24 hours, CoinGlass data shows.