Negative news out of China is dominating the cryptoverse and suppressing the market, as it has for much of the week in one form or another. But for now at least, Bitcoin and pals have stemmed the bleeding.
Thanks to today’s PBoC (People’s Bank of China) crypto-banning “bombshell”, the entire market cap took a bit of a beating and, since this time yesterday, is down 4.6 per cent at US$1.97 trillion.
Bitcoin (BTC) looked like it was packing its bags for a sub-$40K journey a short time ago, but it’s currently enjoying a staycation in the US$41.5K to $US42.2K district. Maybe it can lock down a level of support somewhere there. It’s down 4.5 per in the past 24 hours.
Ethereum (ETH), meanwhile has also levelled out a bit since plunging back under US$3K. It’s changing hands for US$2,865 (-7.27%).
Things were generally looking pretty good 24 hours ago, but crypto just can’t take a trick this week. Geez, it almost seems like markets are manipulated through the coordinated spread of conveniently delayed, timed and rehashed news. Ah, but surely that’s not what’s happening…
Mooners and shakers
As for some of the other top 10 cryptos today, it’s a mixed bag, but no.3 on the list and one of Ethereum’s chief smart-contract platform rivals, Cardano (ADA), has actually managed to avoid too much price drama.
At the time of writing, ADA is the least-affected crypto in the top 40 or so, discounting stablecoins. It’s down 1.3 per cent in the past 24 hours and travelling okay for now at US$2.20.
Some of the biggest-tanking coins so far today include exchange coins Huobi Token (HT) -21%; and the OKEx token (OKB) -17%. And here’s the likely reason why…
Fellow exchange token Binance Coin (BNB), on the other hand, is currently down 6.7 per cent, which is about the current price-drop average for the top 20 coins by market cap.
Are there any outliers having a green day? Yup, actually quite a few, surprisingly.
Some of the more notable ones include: gaming and NFT platform Phantasma (SOUL), +37.6%; decentralised options-trading platform Oddz (ODDZ), +30.28%; DeFi interoperability protocol Ren (REN), +24.22%; play-to-earn gaming enabler Yield Guild Games (YGG), +18.85%; and decentralised oracle Umbrella Finance (UMB), +17.29%.
Ren has had some big inter-crypto partnership news recently, including Solana and Arbitrum integrations. China FUD or not, it seems to have perked up the “Ren to 10” moon-mission crowd once more…