The cryptocurrency market is facing a downside today and the big games are also having their fair share.
As the prices of major digital currencies such as Bitcoin, XRP, and Dfinity have fallen by more than 5%, the crypto market has lost 4.6% of its market capitalization value in the past 24 hours.
The market leader Bitcoin fell 6.1% and is currently trading at $35,786 at the time of writing this. This is almost half of the all-time high of $64,800 set in the peaceful days of mid-April this year.
After hitting its price of $40,000, Bitcoin had an optimistic start this week. On Monday the price of Bitcoin $41,117, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that once Bitcoin miners can confirm “reasonable (about 50%) clean energy use and have a positive future trend”, his company will reconsider accepting the currency.
However, the green CEO is not the only one who pointed out Bitcoin’s controversial energy use this week.
On Thursday, Bank of England CFO Tom Mutton announced that the UK’s Central Bank is still conflicted about whether it will launch its own CBDC (a central bank-backed digital currency, such as China’s digital yuan).
Mutton stated that if the UK were to launch a government currency, it would be a completely different technology from Bitcoin, taking into account the “performance defects and energy inefficiency” of Bitcoin.
A Goldman Sachs report this week stated that Bitcoin is not yet “an investible asset class.” Despite increasing institutional support for the currency, the adoption of Bitcoin is still far from being widespread.
The announcement was made shortly after Wall Street giants said they planned to start trading Ethereum derivatives contracts and began offering Bitcoin futures contracts.
Finally, this week, China’s crackdown on digital currencies has entered a new phase. The Ya’an Municipal Government in Sichuan ordered energy companies to cut off electricity for Bitcoin mining operations.
Both the National Science and Technology Office and the Provincial Energy Office have notified the miners that they must be closed next Friday.
XRP have suffered the most among the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. It fell 6.3% overnight to 79 cents. Ripple, the predecessor of XRP, recently won a public relations battle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
In December last year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit alleging that Ripple had been selling XRP as unregistered securities.
Ripple won a discovery motion requesting documents on the SEC’s internal policy approach for cryptocurrency market leaders Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ripple’s lawyers want to know whether the SEC is biased in its XRP allegations.
In the same week, Ripple won another ruling that prevented the SEC from receiving Eight years of financial records Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse (Brad Garlinghouse) and his predecessor Chris Larson.
Last week, the US Securities and Exchange Commission requested another two months to disclose internal documents and e-mails related to Bitcoin and Ethereum.
It claimed it has compiled 25,000 different documents and is still reviewing “tens of thousands”, more but he needs to interview former employees to understand these materials.
Finally, Dfinity’s Internet Computer Token (ICP) broke through the top 20 in market value last night. It fell by 8% to a bearish price of $48.63 today.
This is a huge fall from grace for this ambitious and well-known project, which claims to be a blockchain-based alternative to the $370 billion cloud computing industry.
At the time of issue, the value of this coin was approximately US$730.
For these cryptocurrencies, this may not a good day, but it is not a devastating crash.
