Bitcoin slips to $74,437 as Nvidia scandal and LNbits hack sour tech sentiment
Bitcoin traded at $74,437 on Monday, down 1.9% over 24 hours, after touching $73,500 overnight and liquidating roughly $800 million in leveraged positions within hours, according to Caio Villa, product and relationship lead at brokerage Brasil Bitcoin.
The move came as Nvidia shares fell more than 5% in pre-market trading after chief executive Jensen Huang admitted to an extramarital relationship with an executive whom US intelligence authorities suspect of being a Chinese spy. Vault Capital said in a report that the news landed at the worst possible moment, given that the financial market lost $2 trillion on Thursday from the sell-off in artificial intelligence stocks.
Crypto also faced a fresh security incident: LNbits, a wallet and payments platform running on Bitcoin's Lightning Network, suffered hacker attacks. The scale is far smaller than recent cyberattacks, including the $6.3 billion stolen from Binance, but adds to the market's unease.
Vault chief investment officer Marco Aurélio de Camargos said a weekly close below $74,968 would take bitcoin out of its defence range and extend the correction, with targets at $72,600 and $69,600. Villa said he is watching the $73,700 to $74,000 band ahead of US October consumer price data due on Tuesday, with economists expecting a 0.3% monthly rise after 0.6% in September.
US spot bitcoin ETFs recorded a net outflow of $411.9 million on Friday, with BlackRock's IBIT accounting for $403 million of the selling. Ether ETFs saw a net outflow of $93.3 million, and the crypto Fear & Greed index fell from 31 to 28, deepening the market's fear.
What it means for Pakistan: For Pakistani crypto holders, the slide is a reminder that bitcoin still trades as a risk asset tied to global tech sentiment, and that leveraged positions can be wiped out in hours. The LNbits incident also underlines custody risk on Lightning wallets, a concern for Pakistani users who rely on self-custody while the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority builds out the country's VASP licensing framework.
