The crypto market has lost 47% of its value in the last 7 days

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The cryptocurrency market suffered a sharp sell-off on Wednesday. Its value has now tumbled by 47% in just the last seven days.

The market cap for global digital currencies came in at $1.35 trillion on Monday, down from a recent peak of $2.56 trillion on May 12, according to data from CoinMarketCap.com.

The most recent plunge was triggered by the People's Bank of China announcement that digital tokens can't be used as a form of payment by financial institutions.

"The cryptocurrency market is under relentless selling pressure at the moment," Nicholas Cawley, an analyst at DailyFX, told Insider. "The speed of the sell-off suggests that leveraged accounts are being hit badly and the indiscriminate slump across the space also points to a lack of buying intent."

Bitcoin at one point fell as much as 31%, to $30,016.83, while ether slipped by 44% to $1,918.77 at intraday lows.

Bitcoin still hasn't recovered from Elon Musk's climate-related concerns over its mining process, which sent shockwaves across the digital asset ecosystem.

But some experts such as Jeffrey Wang, head of America's at the Amber Group, are not too concerned.

"Crypto is an inherently volatile asset class, so swift and violent moves are going to happen over the course of time.," he told Insider. "This was a large flush out and if the market wants to continue higher it was likely necessary to remove some of the froth from overleveraged positions."

John Wu, president of Ava Labs, the team behind altcoin Avalanche, for his part noted that recent news such as China and Musk are just excuses for the sharp movements – not the real cause.

"Over the last few months, growth stocks in the equity markets have been collapsing," Wu told Insider. "As institutional money entered crypto over the last year, the correlation between these high-growth tech stocks and bitcoin has tightened compared to previous years."

Looking ahead, Wu said some of those growth names have stabilized. Cryptocurrencies, he said, could be at the tail end of this correction as the last asset class to absorb the slide in growth stocks.

The cryptocurrency market capitalization hit $2 trillion for the first time on April 5, doubling in value in just three months. It has breached the $2 trillion mark several times since.

On Wednesday, cryptocurrency linked-stocks plummeted in lockstep with the digital assets with shares of Coinbase, Riot Blockchain, and Marathon Digital Holdings all down by more than 10%.

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