Bitcoin remained below $7,000 as a punishing first quarter ended

Bitcoin remained below $7,000 on April 1, 2018, closing a three-month reversal that had erased approximately half its value since the beginning of 2018. The retreat was the clearest market-wide consequence of cryptocurrency’s transition from the speculative surge of late 2017 into a sustained selloff.

Kraken’s official daily report placed bitcoin at $6,945 on April 1, with $174 million traded in bitcoin markets and $269 million across all markets on the exchange. Kraken had reported bitcoin at $13,827 on January 1. A Coinburn calculation comparing those two venue-specific daily marks produces a decline of 49.8%.

CoinMarketCap’s aggregated April 1 snapshot recorded bitcoin at $6,844.23, down 2.29% over its preceding 24-hour measurement window and 19.95% over seven days. Its December 31, 2017 snapshot had placed bitcoin at $14,156.44. Comparing the two snapshots gives a 51.7% decline.

Those figures are not contradictory. Cryptocurrency traded continuously across multiple exchanges, with no official consolidated closing auction. Kraken’s number described activity on one exchange, while CoinMarketCap combined data from multiple venues. Daily boundaries, currency pairs, venue composition and aggregation methods could all change the reported mark.

The selloff extended beyond bitcoin

The April 1 CoinMarketCap snapshot showed ether at $379.61, XRP at $0.4851 and bitcoin cash at $643.03. On December 31, 2017, the same service recorded those assets at $756.73, $2.3006 and $2,533.01, respectively.

Coinburn calculations across that common snapshot window produce declines of 49.8% for ether, 78.9% for XRP and 74.6% for bitcoin cash. The comparison indicates that the reversal was not confined to bitcoin. Several of the largest cryptoassets by reported market capitalization had surrendered an even greater share of their late-2017 valuations.

Bitcoin’s reported market capitalization fell from $237.47 billion in the December 31 snapshot to $116.03 billion on April 1, a decrease of approximately $121.44 billion, or 51.1%. Market capitalization is calculated by multiplying a reference price by reported circulating supply; it does not represent cash withdrawn from the asset and should not be interpreted as realized investor losses.

Why the threshold mattered

The sub-$7,000 level mattered less as a technical boundary than as an institutional signal. Bitcoin had approached $20,000 on some exchanges in December 2017, and the subsequent reversal challenged assumptions that retail demand, newly launched regulated futures and expanding public attention would produce an uninterrupted rise.

Contemporaneous reporting also associated the broader deterioration with regulatory scrutiny, exchange-security concerns and restrictions imposed by some financial institutions and advertising platforms. Those developments formed part of the market environment, but the surviving records do not establish that any single announcement caused the April 1 price. A continuous, fragmented market does not permit that causal precision.

What the record establishes

The defensible conclusion for April 1, 2018 is narrow: two independently maintained market records placed bitcoin below $7,000, and consistent comparisons showed a loss of roughly half its value from the opening of 2018. Large alternative cryptoassets had also declined sharply.

The figures describe specific venues and snapshot windows, not a universal closing price or an investable total-market index. They establish the scale and breadth of the selloff without determining whether April 1 marked a lasting bottom, a temporary interruption or the endpoint of the larger decline. None of those outcomes was knowable from the April 1 record alone.