Following a failed challenge of the $70,000 level during early Monday trading hours in Asia, bitcoin {{BTC}} fell below $67,000 in U.S. morning action.

Recently, bitcoin's price was lower 2.3% over the past 24 hours, underperforming the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index's 1% loss during the same period. Ethereum's ether {{ETH}} was also down nearly 1%, while litecoin {{LTC}}, polkadot {{DOT}} and the internet Computer Protocol's token {{ICP}} led losses with 4%-5% declines.

A notable outperformer was Solana {{SOL}} with 2.4% gain to $163, though still down from its $170 weekend high.

Bitcoin mining stocks also suffered, but one outlier was TeraWulf (WULF), which recently pivoted to high-performance computing to power artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. It's higher by 12% on Monday.

Checking possible catalysts for today's action, one need look no further than the recent price movement: bitcoin had risen in near-continuous fashion since dipping to just under $60,000 eleven days ago – a modest reversal was surely in the cards at some point. There's also been a sharp rise in interest rates across Western economies on Monday, among them 10 basis point gains in both the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield and the German 10-year Bund yield. Other things being equal, higher rates can often pressure prices of risk assets, bitcoin among them.

Zooming out a bit further, bitcoin – for the moment – remains in the same flat-to-down price channel its been in since recording a record high of $73,700 more than seven months ago. Prior to today, the most recent challenge of the $70,000 level was in late July. It too failed and bitcoin had sunk to under $52,000 days later.

"Wouldn't be unreasonable to get another HL [higher low] potentially with a sweep of $66K, probably where the next opportunity is," well-followed analyst Skew said in an X post.