The sell-off of bitcoin on Monday is a sign that the increase in the price of bitcoin this year has prompted some investors in digital assets to take profits.

The price of bitcoin fell by 8% on Monday, and it was the biggest decline in a month.

According to the analytics company Glassnode, about 40,000 BTC (worth $2.1 billion) have been transferred to major crypto exchanges since Friday, leading to an increase in bitcoin reserves to levels not seen since late January.

CEO of South Korean cryptocurrency company CryptoQuant Ki Young-ju told CoinDesk that the bitcoin flow was mostly going to the US company Gemini, which received about 34,000 BTC before the market sell-off on Monday.

The blockchain data exhibits a flow of about 28,000 BTC to Gemini around 11:00 UTC. According to CryptoQuant, on Sunday (19:00 UTC) New York time, the price of the cryptocurrency reached the level of $58,000.

Monday's price decline coincided with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's speech to the New York Times' DealBook DC Policy Project that bitcoin is not widely used as a "transaction mechanism."

According to Yellen, cryptocurrency is an "extremely inefficient way" to conduct transactions, and "the amount of energy consumed to process these transactions is staggering."

"Fixing positions can lead us to the $40,000 - $42,000 level, which is the trading level of a hedge fund," Singapore-based QCP Capital said on its Telegram channel. "If the $40,000 level doesn't hold, the bulls will lose."

How deep will it go? According to David Lifshitz, chief investment officer at the Paris-based quantitative trading company ExoAlpha, if things turn bad in the short term, bitcoin may see a price of 30,000, and this already looks like an absolute bottom.

CoinDesk's Omkar Godbole notes that such a drop is a macroeconomic factor that can explain the change in prices. US inflation-adjusted bond yields are rising, with real yields turning positive for the first time since June 2020. This supports the bullish sentiment for the US dollar, and investors, reducing risks, are investing in treasury bonds. When profitability rises, this is exactly a bearish case for gambling like Bitcoin and stocks.