
A deteriorating macroeconomic climate and the demise of industrial giants such as FTX and Terra have impacted the price of Bitcoin this year.
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The cryptocurrency market suffered a heavy sell-off on Saturday night amid Iranian drone and missile strikes on Israel.
Bitcoin It fell nearly 8 percent Saturday evening as U.S. officials confirmed an attack was underway. Digital coins were some of the only riskier assets to trade over the weekend and the decline was seen as an early reaction to rising tensions in the Middle East.
Bitcoin was trading at around $70,000 on Saturday evening but fell below $62,000, according to data from the Bitstamp exchange. By Sunday morning it had returned to trade above $64,000. Other coins such as Ether also saw heavy sales, in some cases down as much as 10%.
According to Bloomberg, bitcoin’s selloff was the fastest in more than a year, with the coin recently hitting new records amid inflows into U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs that drive the cryptocurrency’s price action.
In the Middle East, the overnight events marked the first direct attack on Israel from Iranian soil. Israel said it had identified 300 “various types of threats” and linked “99%” to Israeli territory.
The barrage of drones and missiles on Israel was reportedly in response to a suspected Israeli strike that killed a senior Iranian official in Syria.
The Iranian currency hit a record low of 705,000 rials/US dollar on the unofficial market around 10:30 a.m. local time on Sunday, according to data from foreign exchange monitoring site Bonbust.
The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange’s flagship index, the TA-35, was down 0.38 percent at 10:23 a.m. London time.
-CNBC’s Ruxandra Iordache contributed to this article.