The past several weeks have been quite the negative turmoil for the cryptocurrency market, as it all started at the end of March. Interestingly, this coincides with a similar drop for the largest US-based stock market indexes, which led to a multi-month high in terms of correlations between Wall Street and crypto.
The Market Meltdowns
Following the rocky start of the year, bitcoin and most altcoins started to regain traction in March. BTC alone spiked to nearly $50,000 after slipping below $35,000 six weeks earlier.
The US stock market was in a similar position. All of its benchmark indexes – namely, the S&P 500, the Dow Jones, and Nasdaq Composite – went down prior to March but peaked at the end of it.
This is where the landscape started to change as the US Federal Reserve began raising the interest rates after years of looser policies. The crypto community is painfully aware of what happened in the digital asset space in the following month and a half. In fact, BTC had sliced its value by half at one point and struggles at around $30,000 as of now.
The significantly more regulated and less volatile by nature US stock market indexes have experienced more modest declines in the same timeframe but are still well in the red. The Dow is down by 12%, the S&P by 15%, while Nasdaq, propelled by the correction in the tech sector, has seen a 22% decrease.
Yesterday became the worst trading day since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, with losses of up to 5%. The futures contracts declined as well, bringing fears of a bear market, while today’s market opening brought some more pain.
Crypto-US Stock Correlation Spikes
Given the aforementioned data, the blockchain analytics resource IntoTheBlock concluded that the correlation between the two largest cryptocurrencies – BTC and ETH – and the three most prominent US stock market indexes has increased to multi-month highs.
In fact, the company revealed that the 30-day correlation is above 0.9 (the highest is 1) and noted that “crypto is moving almost in tandem with traditional equities.”
$BTC and $ETH correlation with traditional markets continue to be extremely high
Our correlation matrix displays how crypto is moving almost in tandem with traditional equities such as Nasdaq, S&P500 and Dow Jones
30-day correlation is above 0.9
Chart: https://t.co/Wx8RxQwatF pic.twitter.com/hsUbUMU9HH
— IntoTheBlock (@intotheblock) May 19, 2022
At the same time, gold, traditionally regarded as a safe haven asset with little-to-no positive correlation with riskier options like stocks and crypto, peaked in early March but has also declined heavily since then.