By Samuel Indyk
Investing.com – The slide in Bitcoin continued on Tuesday morning with the world’s largest cryptocurrency down over 12%. The slide comes after a mammoth run in the cryptocurrency and despite the recent drop, bitcoin is just back to levels seen just eight days ago.
Yellen warning
Part of the decline has been after a warning from the former Fed chair and current US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Yellen described bitcoin as an “extremely inefficient way to conduct transactions” that is often used for illegal transactions.
“People should beware it can be extremely volatile and I do worry about potential losses that investors could suffer,” Yellen said.
Bitcoin price
Despite the decline seen over the last few days, bitcoin is still up over 60% year to date. The rally has come as corporations start welcoming cryptocurrencies, started by Tesla adding at to its balance sheet as a way of diversifying reserves.
As more companies - such as Mastercard (NYSE:MA) and Bank of New York Mellon (NYSE:BK) - announced certain bitcoin projects, the price continued to rise and the market cap rose to over $1tln late last week. Now, the market cap of bitcoin has fallen back below $900bln.
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the rally is over. The price is still only back to where it was on February 15th and Yellen admitted that digital currencies are likely to stick around.
“It makes sense for central banks to be looking at [issuing sovereign digital currencies],” Yellen said.