Bitcoin fell below $7,000 as the crypto selloff deepened

Bitcoin fell below $7,000 on February 5, 2018, extending the digital-asset market's sharp reversal from the speculative highs reached in December 2017. CoinMarketCap's historical snapshot for February 5 marked bitcoin at $6,955.27, down 16.40% over its displayed 24-hour window and 38.05% over seven days. The snapshot put bitcoin's market capitalization at $117.18 billion and reported $9.29 billion of 24-hour volume.

A contemporaneous Reuters report supplied a venue-level check: bitcoin traded as low as $6,853.53 on Bitstamp during the New York afternoon. The two figures are not contradictory. Reuters described an intraday print on the Bitstamp BTC/USD market, while CoinMarketCap preserved an aggregated point-in-time snapshot. Crypto had no official consolidated close, so the venue, timestamp and calculation boundary matter.

The selloff was broader than bitcoin

CoinMarketCap's February 5 cross-section showed synchronized losses among the largest assets. Ether was marked at $697.95, down 16.97% over 24 hours; XRP at $0.6918, down 16.50%; and bitcoin cash at $887.41, down 23.45%. Those were CoinMarketCap's displayed rolling changes, not independently calculated returns and not guaranteed to match any single exchange's daily candle.

The breadth mattered. This was not merely a bitcoin-specific price break. Capital was leaving much of the liquid crypto complex at once, after the late-2017 boom had pushed many assets to record or near-record valuations. A round-number breach below $7,000 also made the reversal visible to a much wider audience, but the threshold had no protocol significance: Bitcoin's network rules did not change when the market price crossed it.

Regulation and access tightened around the market

The session unfolded amid several verifiable pressure points, though the surviving record cannot assign a precise share of the decline to any one headline. China's State Council website reported on February 5 that the People's Bank of China intended to tighten controls on domestic investors' participation in overseas ICO and virtual-currency transactions. The notice said risks remained high after authorities had banned ICOs and ordered domestic cryptocurrency exchanges shut in September 2017. It described further measures prospectively; it did not document that every overseas platform had already become inaccessible.

Reuters also reported that Lloyds Banking Group and Virgin Money were barring cryptocurrency purchases on credit cards, following similar moves by JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup. The banks' stated concern was that falling token values could leave borrowers unable to repay card debt. These restrictions were institution-specific limits on a funding channel, not bans on owning bitcoin or using bank deposits to purchase it.

Taken together, the records show a market facing tighter retail access and heightened regulatory scrutiny. They do not prove that the Chinese notice or card restrictions caused the full February 5 move. Crypto trading was fragmented across venues, leverage and forced selling were not comprehensively reported, and conventional equity markets were also experiencing severe volatility.

What the February 5 record establishes

The defensible conclusion is narrow: bitcoin traded below $7,000 on a major dollar exchange, an aggregated market snapshot showed a 16.40% 24-hour decline, and other leading cryptoassets fell by comparable or larger percentages. That combination made February 5 a consequential stage in the unwinding of the 2017 crypto boom.

The price record establishes magnitude, not motive. CoinMarketCap's snapshot does not expose a consolidated auction, and its volume and market-capitalization figures aggregate assets and venues with differing liquidity and data quality. Reuters' Bitstamp low is precise but venue-specific. Any stronger causal claim would require order-book, liquidation and cross-venue flow data that the cited contemporaneous record does not provide.