The head of the Federal Reserve met in May with the CEO of the largest American crypto exchange Coinbase before the collapse of Bitcoin.
Many experts also attributed the previous fall of Bitcoin since the end of 2017 to the actions of the American Central Bank.
Bitcoin has lost all correlation with the US stock market since about mid-May. Since May 13, the S&P 500 stock index has grown by 7%, while the bitcoin exchange rate has fallen twice.
On May 11, the head of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell met with the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, follows from the recently published schedule of meetings of Powell for May. A month before that, Coinbase was listed on the Nasdaq exchange.
It is noteworthy that Powell then personally met with Armstrong, and not in a remote format via Zoom, as most of his meetings take place. Former White House Speaker Paul Ryan was also present at that meeting. It is not known what they were talking about.
The next day, on May 12, the head of the Federal Reserve met with the former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Christopher Giancarlo. In the schedule, he is announced as the head of a private initiative to develop a digital dollar.
Armstrong on May 14 tweeted about his trip to Washington, but did not say a word about the conversation with Powell. According to him, during the week he met with "members of Congress and heads of various federal agencies".
One way or another, but May 12 is exactly the day when bitcoin began a sharp decline from $58,000, ending up in eight days around $30,000. The decline was then associated with the May 12 tweet by Elon Musk about the termination of the acceptance of Bitcoins by Tesla.
Nevertheless, in the light of the newly discovered facts, market participants are beginning to wonder what the head of the Federal Reserve said to the CEO of Coinbase, after which bitcoin experienced the largest collapse of the exchange rate since December 2017.
The Coinbase crypto exchange, founded in 2012, is used by more than 56 million individuals from 100 countries around the world. As of the end of March, assets worth $223 billion were traded on it.
The incessant growth of cryptocurrencies could be dangerous for Coinbase because speculators holding assets for the sake of further growth do not make transactions, which deprives the exchange of trading volumes, and therefore commissions.