Bitcoin's Price Just Dropped Over $1,300 in 1.5 Hours

The price of a bitcoin has just plummeted by over $1,300 in little more than an hour.

Having been on the slide in recent days, in large part seemingly due to new regulatory efforts to calm the enthusiastic crypto market in South Korea, chart analysis had indicated that bitcoin would recover and even return to $15,000 levels today. However, that did not happen.

The cryptocurrency opened today's session at $13,585, and reached a high of $13,601 before the sudden tumble at soon after 07:00 UTC that saw the price drop from $13,210 down to $11,850 at 08:30 UTC. That's a fall of $1,360 in just 1.5 hours.

The drop puts the price of a bitcoin at a month low. Dec. 5 saw bitcoin at a similar level, however, that was when the cryptocurrency was climbing fast on the way to setting a new price record around $20,000, as the launch of bitcoin futures contracts from CME Group and CBOE was being anticipated by the trading community.

At press time, bitcoin had recovered slightly, and was trading at $12,195 – down 10 percent for today, according to Coinmarket's Bitcoin Price Index.

The news comes as the wider cryptocurrency market is seeing losses. All the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization are in the red today, with ethereum down 14 percent, Ripple down 21 percent and bitcoin cash down 19 percent over the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap data.

The overall market cap for all tokens is at $584.9 billion at press time – down from a high of $832 billion on Jan. 7.