Bitcoin fell as much as 14 per cent to $51,541 on Sunday, losing most of the gains it made over the past week where it hit record highs at nearly $65,000. The cryptocurrency was last trading down 10 per cent at $53,991 as of 13:20 GMT on Sunday, $12,000 below the record highs set on Wednesday. 

Smaller rival Ether, dropped 10 per cent to $2,101.

It was cited by data website CoinMarketCap that Bitcoin fell due to a blackout in China’s Xinjiang region, which reportedly powers a lot of the cryptocurrency's mining.

Some widely-followed blockchain analysts on Twitter also pointed to a sharp drop in "hash rate" due to the outage.

Hash rate refers to the volatility index that measures the processing capacity of the entire Bitcoin network. It also determines the power required by miners to produce new Bitcoins.

The fall in Bitcoin also comes after Turkey’s central bank banned the use of cryptocurrencies for purchases. But Bitcoin is still up 89 per cent so far in 2021, boosted by its mainstream acceptance as an investment and a means of payment.

Dogecoin, originally created as a joke, also fell back from its latest peak.

Dogecoin has gained more than 6,000 per cent since the start of 2021, from $0.0046 to about $0.30 on Sunday, having briefly hit $0.43 on Friday.

FURTHER READING: Turkey bans crypto payments sending Bitcoin down