Why are almost all the cryptocurrencies dropping?

It seems everyone has missed the real reason for the recent drops. Forget about the Binance hack rumors, anything about institutions or governments. Yes, they have an impact but they are not the catalyst for the recent drops.

The origin of this answer requires us to look back a few years.

Mt.Gox, one of the original Bitcoin exchanges, was hacked in 2014. At the time Mt.Gox was handling c.70% of Bitcoin transactions worldwide and naturally, this hack sent bitcoin spiraling down from its all-time high into a bear market for several years.

During this time Mt.Gox managed to recover a proportion of the stolen Bitcoin. Legal proceedings concluded to enforce that Mt.Gox pay their users back, but in fiat rather than in Bitcoin. Because of Bitcoins price increases during this time, paying the unfortunate users back is achievable but it means the owners of Mt.Gox must sell their Bitcoin stash.

And that is exactly what has been happening. They have been dumping 1000s of Bitcoins at a time, periodically over the last few months. Adding huge sell orders to the market, without the quantity of buy orders to fulfill those sell orders at that price means that the sell orders are filled with lower-priced buy orders until the sell order quantity is sold = price falls to fulfill the number of sell orders.

Or in simple terms… supply is greater than demand because of these unnatural selling events.
Don’t be concerned. The rumors are that they have reached the amount that they can legally sell off for now. Meaning that supply and demand levels will return to normal and flip back to demand to be greater and therefore sending the price higher.