If you haven't been keeping up with the latest crytpo-prices they may shock you, but long-term cryptocurrency investers most likely will not be taken by surprise. The market is incredibly volatile. The two most popular crytpocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum both have seen a significant price drop. Bitcoin dropping from around $3000 to $2300 and Ethereum dropping from around $400 to $220! That is a nearly 50% drop at the time of posting this.
These drops are not without their reasons however. Ethereum and Bitcoin are closely tied to eachother's value. The main reasons that there have been drops to the Ether price which also reflected on bitcoin are these:
1 - There was a flash crash where on the popular exchange GDAX which is associated with coinbase.com where someone put in a multi-million dollar sell-order worth of Ethereum which really stirred the market. People doing margin trading ended up auto-selling to prevent losses and also people with stop-loss sell orders sold off their Ethereum when ETH price hit their limits. This caused the price of Ethereum to drop down from $317.81 to $0.10 momentarily with eager buyers stabilizing the market.
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GDAX have also posted that they will be compensating customers who lost their money in the crash but most likely you will only get a portion of what you originally had.
GDAX's vice president said this on the matter,
"We will establish a process to credit customer accounts which experienced a margin call or stop loss order executed on the GDAX ETH-USD order book as a direct result of the rapid price movement at 12.30pm PT on June 21, 2017. This process will allow affected customers to restore the value of their ETH-USD account to the equivalent value of their ETH-USD account at the moment prior to the rapid price movement."
2 - There was also a hoax-news-story about Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum founder, dying in a car crash that has been pulled from the originating site. There was lots of controversy over this article which resulted in Vitalik Responding with this image on his twitter:
3 - New ICO's, initial coin offerings, such as EOS where people are using Ethereum to recieve funding for their coins and distribute them after a certain period. This coin also is supposed to be Ethereum's biggest competition and it was created by Dan Larimer, co-founder of steemit.com and Bitshares. I will not go too far into EOS but there are many articles about it on this site.
Prices have hovered around 200-250 these past couple days which have been the lowest they have been in a while. So there may be a price-correction soon that may increase it in value.
Disclaimer: Again this is all speculation and I am not advising anyone to buy into Ethereum. I am no financial adviser just a blockchain-enthusiast.
As always, only invest what you can afford to lose.
On a side note, I just transferred my Steem into Steem power and will be dispersing it into constructive comments, followers and re-steems. Thank you.