August 21, 2023: Bitcoin declines over 9% after inflation report causes investors to flee risky assets.

According to Coin Metrics data, the cryptocurrency in the previous traded at $26,593.68, reflecting a more than 8% reduction.

The decrease in bitcoin followed several hours after The Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX, which Elon Musk helms, wrote down the value of its bitcoin holdings by a total of $373 million in 2022 and 2021, and that the space travel enterprise had sold the virtual currency.

“This is one of the numerous brutal minute-by-minute selloffs we’ve seen in the history of Bitcoin,” Ryan Rasmussen, a researcher at Bitwise Asset Management, said.

“The current belief is it’s an Elon Musk/SpaceX-driven selloff.” He noted that this latest dramatic decline is “short-sighted and largely retail-driven.”

In 2022, Tesla, which Musk also leads as CEO, announced that it sold about 75% of its bitcoin holdings after funding $1.5 billion in the flagship cryptocurrency.

The billionaire executive has historically been a vocal supporter of crypto.

A recent study found that Musk’s views of certain altcoins on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, has boosted the prices of those cryptocurrencies.

In 2021, speaking at “The B-Word” conference, Maui said, “If the price of bitcoin is going down, I am losing money. I might pump, but I don’t dump.”

Bitcoin had been under pressure earlier, starting after the Federal Reserve issued the minutes from its July policy meeting. In Thursday’s session, the cryptocurrency sagged to its lowest level in almost two months.