Bitcoin (BTC) falls by $10,000 in two days, causing the cryptocurrency market to suffer losses of over $400 billion (Weekend Watch)

In an even more eventful and painful night of trading on Saturday, Bitcoin prices fell another five grand to a multi-week low of about $61,000.

Alternative coins were hit even harder, seeing many double-digit price declines. The main cause of this crash was rising tensions between Iran and Israel.

BTC roller coaster continues

It was just 48 hours ago that the BTC price hovered above $70,000 and even tried to hit $71,000 to no avail. But the situation worsened after a speech Friday night from senior officials representing the U.S. central bank said the Fed had no plans to start cutting interest rates anytime soon.

Within minutes, the price of major cryptocurrencies fell by 5-6 grand, to $65,000. Interestingly, almost all financial markets fell on Friday, even the price of gold fell by about 4%.

Bitcoin managed to recover on Saturday morning, rising to just over $67,000. But then, tensions between Iran and Israel escalated rapidly, and the price of cryptocurrencies plummeted again.

This time, the assets have fallen to a multi-week low of just over $61,000 (on Bitstamp), leaving more than $700 million in liquidated funds. It has bounced back pretty well and is now above $64,000, but the risk remains given that it is the only market open for trading today.

The company's market capitalization has fallen by about $130 billion since Friday to $1.27 trillion. However, its advantage over alternatives rose by about 2% over the same period.

The alternative was crushed.

This usually happens when BTC heads south sharply, but so do most altcoins. In fact, it has fallen even more sharply over the past 48 hours or so.

A lot of people got bounced back as well, but it's been a very tough two days in a row. As the graph below shows, we've seen quite a few double-digit price declines, but SOL, XRP, DOGE, TON, ADA, AVAX, SHIB, DOT, and ETH are still in the red.

The market capitalization of cryptocurrencies fell from about $2.8 trillion on Friday morning to about $2.33 trillion yesterday evening. It has since recovered to about $100 billion, but is still down 5% on the day.