Once again, the weekend has been a harsh one for cryptocurrencies as crypto prices continued to drop. In fact, the steep fall in prices wiped over nearly $200 billion off the total market cap in a matter of few days. Currently, the crypto market across the globe is valued at $1.6 trillion, a drop of 3% in the past 24 hours.
Additionally, the total crypto market volume over the last 24 hours fell by nearly 18% to reach $93.61 billion, while the total volume in DeFi currently stands at $9.81 billion.
Let us see how the various cryptocurrencies fared during the slump. The largest cryptocurrency of them all – Bitcoin – fell to $34,702.69 on Sunday morning, a fall of 3.8% from Friday evening. Later, it dropped below $34,000 and is currently trading at $33,865, which is less than half of its all-time high of over $67,000 back in November 2021.
Then again, this does not come as surprising news, given that the price of Bitcoin has continued to hover between the $35,000-$45,000 range as the going has gotten tougher for the crypto market. Some of the reasons behind this are the Russian invasion of Ukraine (which is yet to end), rising inflation and central banks stepping up to curb it, and apprehensions of rate hikes by the Federal Reserve?
How did Bitcoin’s fellow cryptocurrencies fare during the weekend? Surprisingly, it is TRON (a decentralized, open-source blockchain-based operating system with its own cryptocurrency, Tronix) that is the only one to clock a growth in an otherwise dismal crypto landscape. It surged by more than 4% and is currently trading at $0.086.
Looking deeper, we find that Ether, which is the second-largest cryptocurrency and second only to Bitcoin, fell by more than 3% and is currently trading at $2,465. The price of dogecoin, another popular cryptocurrency, fell by almost 1% to trade at $0.12 as well.
Other popular cryptos such as Polkadot, Cardano, Uniswap, Terra, XRP, Avalanche, Polygon, and Stellar experienced a fall in prices as well. Solana is another to clock a steep fall as it fell 13% on the week and almost 60% year to date.
Unfortunately, this fall in crypto prices is not an outlier (something we covered earlier). Instead, it seems to be a recurring theme in the crypto market over the past few years. This raises a much-asked question: why do cryptocurrencies continue to tumble during the weekends?
