Unfortunately for cryptocurrency traders Good Friday is quickly turning into Bad Friday with the market melting down overnight.
While bitcoin (BTC) will take the headlines with its 13.3% decline over the last 24 hours to US$6,898.13 per coin, it isn't the worst performer amongst the major coins.
The two worst performing cryptocurrencies during the last 24 hours have been the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) price and the Litecoin (LTC) price.
Bitcoin Cash has fallen over 20% to US$687.10. This means the bitcoin spin-off has lost almost 45% of its value since this time last month, reducing its market capitalisation to US$11.7 billion.
Litecoin has dropped 16% to US$110.75 per coin during the period. This extends LTC's one-month decline to a sizeable 50.7% and reduces its market capitalisation to US$6.2 billion.
Why is Bitcoin Cash tanking?
Bitcoin Cash appears to have fallen more than most because trading platform OKEx plans to close its Bitcoin Cash Market in token trading today.
In what appears to be a major blow for the altcoin, OKEX stated that: "We will close all the trading pairs in BCH market of Token Trading at 18:00 Mar 30, 2018 (Hong Kong time, UTC+8) due to inadequate liquidity."
Why is Litecoin tanking?
The Litecoin price has come under considerable pressure this week after it was revealed that the LitePay merchant payment processing technology had been scrapped.
The LitePay technology had been seen as a way of bringing Litecoin into the mainstream, allowing retailers to accept the cryptocurrency in-store as easy as a Visa or Mastercard payment.
But with that technology being scrapped soon after launch, it looks as though the Litecoin dream is over, at least for now.
Time will tell what happens from here with these coins and the market as a whole, but with sentiment becoming increasingly negative, I feel there is a chance that more declines are around the corner.
