Bitcoin rises above $36K as 24-hour crypto liquidations pass $500M

cointelegraph.com:

Bitcoin (BTC) edged higher after Wall Street opened on Feb. 24 with Russia's Ukraine invasion and its aftermath still top on markets' agenda. 

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD nearing $36,400 on Bitstamp two hours after the opening bell, up $2,000 from its recent lows.

Skittish markets faced the music from Russia's overnight incursion into Ukraine, a move that continued and ricocheted across global trading.

Russia's stock market unsurprisingly faced a different level of trauma, with MOEX losing 50% and at one point halting trading altogether.

Bitcoin, suffering earlier in the day, nonetheless staged a respectable comeback.

"At the start of the week, escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine had hit crypto markets hard. Our crypto indices were already showing sizeable losses across all sectors," Sahil Sakhrani, a market analyst at crypto research firm Hive, told Cointelegraph.

Sakhrani warned that the announcement of further sanctions against the Russian economy may exacerbate the situation anew and that Bitcoin's correlation to traditional equities markets should not be overlooked.

"Now the news has worsened with an apparent Russian invasion of Ukraine followed by the EU, UK, and US proposing further sanctions against Russia," he continued.

A second bone of contention came in the form of the United States Federal Reserve potentially slackening key rate rises due to the conflict.

Pershaps the #Fed is relieved that #Russia invaded the #Ukraine as now it has an excuse not to raise interest rates in Mar. If it wasn't this it would've been something else, but as far as excuses go this one's hard to top. #Gold spiked 1.5% and #Bitcoin dumped 5.5% on the news.

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