A day after suffering its biggest 24-hour decline in nearly three weeks, the bitcoin showed signs of stability on Tuesday.
A single bitcoinBTCUSD, +0.03% was last changing hands at $6,275.37, up 0.2% since Monday at 5 p.m. Eastern Time on the Kraken exchange.
Monday’s drop of more than 2% brought the total value of all cryptocurrencies back toward $200 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Speaking at the Canadian FinTech Forum in Montreal on Monday, Janet Yellen, the former chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, said bitcoin lacks some key components to make it a sustainable means of payment. “It has long been thought that for something to be a useful currency it needs to be a stable source of value, and bitcoin is anything but,” said Yellen, according to Kitco.com.
“It’s not used for a lot of transactions, it’s not a stable source of value and it’s not an efficient means of processing payments,” she said, according to the report.
Yellen had been relatively tight-lipped on bitcoin when heading the Federal Reserve. Her previous remarks came in December 2017 when she said bitcoin is a highly speculative asset.
Coins other than bitcoin, commonly referred to as altcoins, are crafting out mild gains Tuesday. EtherETHUSD, -0.08%was trading up 0.3% at $193.74, Bitcoin CashBCHUSD, +0.29%was higher by 0.5% at $413.10, LitecoinLTCUSD, +0.00%had gained 0.1% at $48.62 and XRP,XRPUSD, +0.28% was up 0.6% at 44 cents.
In futures trading, the Cboe Global Markets November contractXBTX8, +0.24% finished the day unchanged at $6,245, while the CME Group November contractUS:BTCV8closed up 0.1% at $6,245.