Bitcoin hit smutty meme territory earlier, reaching US$69K, before going down again. Meanwhile, the crypto market is generally still rising, much like the US inflation rate.

Although the $69K figure caused a brief stir, $69,420, is the peak crypto meme level Twitter users seem to be waiting for. The 420 number is a reference to cannabis, in case you didn’t know.

Sixty nine and 420… yep, that’s crypto for ya. Insert Beavis and Butt-Head sniggers here.

The entire crypto market is sitting pretty right now, with a total market cap of US$3.11 trillion, give or take a few billion dollars. It’s presently up, as a collective, about two per cent since this time yesterday.

Coin360.com

After hitting another new all-time high earlier today (US$69,044), Bitcoin (BTC) has settled back into the mid-68K range, trading sideways for the past few hours, at the time of writing this update.

Meanwhile, not to be outdone by its OG orange mate, Ethereum (ETH) also cracked another personal best (we might be saying this a bit before the year’s out), inching ever closer to its US$5K psychological checkpoint. It hit US$4,878 a short while ago, and is up roughly 1.5% in the past 24 hours.

With inflation in the US reaching its highest percentage level since 1990, the Bitcoin (and Ethereum) inflation-hedge narrative appears to be growing stronger by the day. (Gold, incidentally, is also having a good couple of days. It’s up a couple of percentage points over the past day or so.)

 

Mooners and shakers: XRP stirs, IOTX, LRC, KDA and ENS still pumping

The best performer in the top 10 by market cap today is actually the best-performing coin from the legendary 2017 bullrun – XRP. If this old favourite starts moving significantly, even with founder Ripple Labs’ court case with the US Securities and Exchange Commission as yet unresolved, then get ready for another serious “altcoin season”. (Possibly.)

XRP is currently up 5.5% over the past day, and 16.6% over the past seven, changing hands right now for US$1.33 – the highest level it’s been in a couple of months.

The upwards move might be related to Ripple Labs’ announcement it will be launching a service in 2022 it’s calling the Ripple Liquidity Hub. And that’s effectively an exchange aggregator, apparently offering crypto assets at the best prices. Just six cryptos initially, which will include XRP, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin Cash.

Now for some 24-hour double-digit percentage gainers in the top 100… Looking down the list, we can see another strong coin with a big fan base, Chainlink (LINK) +11%; Algorand (ALGO) +10%; Stellar (XLM) +10%; layer 2 scaler Loopring (LRC) still crushing it, +31%; Kadena (KDA) +50%; and IoTeX (IOTX), up a whopping 114%.

As Stockhead reported the other day, IoTeX, which is an Ethereum-compatible blockchain focused on Internet of Things (IOT) technology, appears to be creating a few head-turning partnerships just lately – including one with travel company Travala.

The IoTeX team also appears to be mixing with all the right people in crypto at the moment…

And let’s forget the other standout gainer in that top-100 bunch we listed further above – Kadena. If it keeps going like this, it might start entering the conversation as part of the select bunch of top “layer 1” blockchains.

Kadena describes itself as “the only layer proof-of-work blockchain that scales”.

 

And just to finish up, we mentioned the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) crypto the other day, which launched with a generous, widespread airdrop. Let’s check in on that one.

At the time of writing, ENS is now ranked #123 on CoinGecko and is up 116 per cent since this time yesterday. It’s currently trading for US$81.50, having entered the market at US$17.63 about 24 hours or so ago.

 

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