Yesterday the Cryptoverse was complaining about Bitcoin’s boring price action. BTC listened but didn’t seem impressed with the impatience, falling off the couch and somehow losing US$1,000. Ethereum, meanwhile, has had an up-and-down 24 hours.

That said, ETH is comparatively steady across a seven-day time period. The number two crypto (which probably isn’t the greatest of descriptions for Ethereum fans) spiked, at least for a few hours, overnight on its “Bellatrix” upgrade.

Okay, cool. Bellatrix… What the Fork? Don’t worry, we won’t attempt to get technical – we’ll topline it. Bellatrix is simply the next little “hard fork” stage that prepares the Ethereum network for “Merge” to Proof-of-Stake. We know this, because Vitalik said so…

 

The Merge… looking forward to it. What is it again?

If you’re tuning in late to all this Merge stuff and have little idea what it is, we’ll quickly summarise this as well. It’s Ethereum’s near-mythical-status upgrade – the biggest upgrade the leading smart-contract blockchain has undertaken, and probably will ever undertake.

It’s a lonnng-awaited change to the core structure of Ethereum, moving it from an energy-chewing Proof-of-Work, mining-based protocol (a la Bitcoin) to what’s considered by many to be a far-more-efficient Proof-of-Stake system. PoW and PoS are simply different ways to operate a blockchain and manage and track every transaction on a given network.

If you’re here you probably already know this. If you’ve wandered in here aimlessly, hope that fuels some further curiosity.

Onto some daily price action…

 

Top 10 overview: crypto market dips below $1 trillion

With the overall crypto market cap at US$992 billion and down about 3.5% since yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Oops, it did it again… the entire crypto market has lost about US$11.5 billion since yesterday, sliding off the one-trill rainbow a bit like this…

And for more on that particular butt- (and phone) busting incident, check out Gregor’s ASX Small Caps Lunch Wrap from the other day. In fact, dial into his lunch wrap every day as it’s always stupendously amusing and informative.

But as you can tell from the CoinGecko top 10 chart, it definitely looks like a few major players are landing on their arses pretty hard today. Cardano (ADA) is leading the big daily dippers with an 8.8% come down, although, like Ethereum, it’s steady across a weekly timeframe due to its own upgrade narrative, known as Vasil.

As for Bitcoin, as prominent crypto data-analyst Benjamin Cowen points out, it just closed out the day in the US at one of its lowest ebbs this year…

It’s another little BTC correction that hasn’t caught Cowen by surprise, or various other chart watchers for that matter, including Crypto Ed…

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$7.8 billion to about US$405 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

DAILY PUMPERS

… Annnnd, it’s gone. Sorry, with top stablecoins like USDT and USDC offering the best percentage gains in altcoin land today (e.g. 0.1%), you know the cupboard’s pretty bare on pump-action cryptos at the moment.

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

• DeFiChain (DFI), (market cap: US$608 million) -24%

• Lido DAO (LDO), (mc: US$1.1 billion) -15%

• Ethereum Classic (ETC), (mc: US$4.76 million) -14%

• Celsius (CEL), (mc: US$568 million) -13%

• Kusama (KSM), (mc: US$410 million) -12%

 

Ouch… there’s some serious double-digit dumping going on over the past several hours. Yesterday we mentioned Ethereum Classic’s miner-induced exuberance, but look at it today.

DeFiChain, a protocol working on bringing decentralised finance capabilities to the Bitcoin network, was also riding a wave of positivity yesterday, too.

A reminder, then, that when Bitcoin dumps, altcoins have a habit of falling twice as hard.

 

Around the blocks

A selection of randomness and pertinence that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse…

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