Bitcoin Fell to $33,849 as May’s Crypto Selloff Deepened

Bitcoin fell to $33,849.47 at 18:00 GMT on May 29, 2021, extending a monthlong reversal that had erased nearly half of the cryptocurrency’s value from its April peak. Reuters measured the move at 5.16% below its previous-close reference, a loss of $1,842.99.

Ether declined alongside it. The same contemporaneous snapshot placed ETH at $2,262.06, down 6.26% from Reuters’ previous-close reference. The parallel declines showed that the renewed selling was not confined to bitcoin, although two price observations cannot establish the direction or scale of every digital asset.

The May 29 move mattered because it left bitcoin 47.8% below the $64,895.22 annual high Reuters recorded on April 14. A market that had approached $65,000 six weeks earlier was again trading near levels last seen in January.

What the day’s measurements establish

A separate StatMuse daily series recorded bitcoin opening at $35,684.16, reaching a high of $37,234.50 and a low of $33,693.93 before finishing its May 29 observation at $34,616.07. Coinburn calculates an open-to-finish decline of 2.99% from those two figures.

That calculation is not interchangeable with Reuters’ 5.16% snapshot decline. Reuters reported a price at 18:00 GMT against its own previous-close reference, while StatMuse presents a complete daily observation with a different endpoint. Cryptocurrency trades continuously across fragmented venues, without a consolidated closing auction. Prices and percentage changes therefore depend on the exchange or aggregation method, currency pair, timestamp and day boundary.

The agreement between the records is directional rather than exact: bitcoin traded into the mid-$33,000s on May 29 and remained dramatically below its April high. The differences are a reason to identify each measurement window, not to average the figures into a supposedly universal price.

Reuters estimated bitcoin’s May loss at approximately 38% as of its May 29 report. That was a contemporaneous month-to-date calculation, not the subsequently knowable final return for all of May and not a forecast of where the decline would end.

Regulatory pressure remained central to the market narrative

The weekend decline followed a series of adverse policy and institutional signals. Most consequentially, China’s Financial Stability and Development Committee met on May 21 and called for authorities to crack down on bitcoin mining and trading while preventing individual financial risks from spreading into society.

That official language expanded the market’s concern beyond restrictions on cryptocurrency-related financial services. Mining was now explicitly included in the national policy direction, raising uncertainty around the physical infrastructure supporting a substantial portion of Bitcoin’s computing activity.

By May 29, however, the public record did not yet establish how many mining sites would close, how much computing power would relocate or what provincial enforcement would ultimately entail. Those implementation details emerged over subsequent weeks and should not be projected backward into the May 29 assessment.

Contemporaneous Reuters reporting also connected May’s broader decline to environmental concerns surrounding bitcoin mining and Tesla’s earlier suspension of bitcoin payments. Those developments formed part of the market narrative, but the available records do not prove that any one announcement caused a specified portion of the May 29 price move.

A repricing, not a resolved outcome

The defensible conclusion for May 29 is narrow. Bitcoin and ether experienced renewed selling during a weekend session, bitcoin was trading nearly 48% below its April peak, and regulatory pressure remained a prominent source of uncertainty.

The day did not establish a permanent market bottom, a new legal status for cryptocurrency or the completed removal of Chinese mining capacity. It instead captured a market still repricing policy, environmental and liquidity risks after one of bitcoin’s fastest reversals from a record high.