The year 2021 is coming to an end but the falling prices of cryptocurrencies are not. Major cryptocurrencies continued to slide ahead of the $6 billion crypto options contract expiry on Friday. The global crypto market cap stands at $2.18 trillion with a decrease in trading volume by 6.19 per cent at $95.92 billion at 8.38 am, showed coinmarketcap.com data.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, in a recent podcast, said that he does not yet fully understand Ethereum blockchain-based smart contracts. Smart contracts are contracts that have the capability to self-execute themselves when certain pre-programmed conditions are met. Musk went even further to predict about the official currency of Mars and was quoted as saying, “I don't know if Mars would have a cryptocurrency as a thing, but probably it seems likely, but it would be kind of a localized thing on Mars,” reported Forbes.
The market moves in its own rhythm which is clearer now more than ever. The price of Bitcoin (BTC) was above $50,000 just two days ago and yet now it trades at $46,567.63, down by 3.16 per cent, and continues to go further down. Rival Ethereum (ETH) crashed by 4.57 per cent at $3,643.94. Its trading volume, however, went up by 1.57 per cent at $16,532,564,738.
“Bitcoin continued to face a retracement after the drop, currently trading below $47,000. The market continues to anticipate the expiry of the options contract on December 31.
Smart contract platform tokens, including ALGO and NEAR, surged, with only NEAR maintaining its momentum currently,” says Gaurav Dahake, CEO, Bitbns, a crypto exchange.
Cardano (ADA) is down by 7.83 per cent at $1.31, while Algorand, which is known as the Ethereum killer, was surprisingly up in an otherwise bear market by 4.58 per cent at $1.57; its market cap now stands at $9,956,324,218.
Among other major coins, Binance Coin (BNB) is down by 4.64 per cent at $515.44, while Solana (SOL) fell by 6 per cent at $169.46.
Today’s top gainer was SORA Validator Token (VAL), which was up by 4145.79 per cent at $0.4569. The top loser was Solanyx (SYX), which crashed by 99.92 per cent to $0.00000303.
Meme Coins And DeFi
Dogecoin (DOGE) was trading with a loss of 4.44 per cent at $0.1694, while rival Shiba Inu (SHIB) is down by 6.07 per cent at $0.00003354.
ELON is trading with a loss of 6.88 per cent at $0.000001422, Floki Inu crashed by 15.59 per cent at $0.00009454, while Samoyed Coin (SAMO) is trading with a loss of 6.02 per cent at $0.0379.
In the DeFi segment, YFI (yearn.finance) was trading with a loss of 2.11 per cent at $28,620.00. Terra (LUNA) was down by 5.78 per cent at $82.16. However, Avalanche (AVAX) crashed by 10.29 per cent to $98.62. Uniswap (UNI) was down by 12.06 per cent at $16.79.
Latest Updates
Arcane Research recently published a market research report which said that Ripple (XRP) and ADA may fall out of the top10 crypto leaderboard in 2022. They also said that most meme crypto tokens will fall out of investors' favour, eventually cease to exist, and “most of these tokens will eventually fade into obscurity”, reported cryptopotato.
Meanwhile, North Korean state-sponsored crypto hackers brought in enormous wealth by using their hacking operations over the past five years to the tune of approximately $1.7 billion, Newsies reported. The US Federal Prosecutor’s office was quoted as saying, “The US government has found that North Korean hackers conspired with other money-laundering criminals to steal virtual assets from three virtual asset exchanges and launder the proceeds.”
