It has been an up and down past few months for cryptocurrencies amid massive global events such as the Ukrainian-Russian war and surge of coronavirus cases in China leading to renewed quarantine measures. Inflation has been a central issue for some time as many investors look to other forms of currency such as crypto.
Overall Market
The crypto market overall has enjoyed quite a nice run over the past few weeks with the total crypto market cap rising from roughly $1.73 trillion to $2.15 trillion. The two biggest projects, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), are up 18% and 28%, respectively in that time.
The current market cap is now the highest since the very beginning of 2022 as investors move back to the technology following a rough start to the year for markets. Crypto is still not back to where it was in November of 2021 when Bitcoin stood over $65,000 (currently $45,800) and Ethereum reached above $4,500 (currently $3,280).
While the overall crypto market is heavily swayed by its two biggest projects accounting for over 60% of the market, many investors are looking for new coins that implement blockchain technology in unique ways or simply provide faster transactions than Ethereum’s relatively slow network.
Biggest Winners
Not necessarily new on the block but a primary alternative to Ethereum, Solana (SOL) is up 22% over just the last week. Solana is commonly thought of as the number one competitor to Ethereum due to its size and far faster transaction speeds leading to lower fees.
Other big movers this past week include Avalanche (AVAX), Terra (LUNA), and Hex (HEX) which are all up a little over 10%. When looking at just the last week Bitcoin and Ethereum are still outperforming many but are only up roughly 4.5% and 6.5% respectively as prices fell sharply on Thursday morning.
Meanwhile, the few who are still holding on to their favorite doggy-meme coins should be pleased this week with Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) both up slightly over the last seven days of trading. The coins are still far below where they were at their peak in the meme mania and are lower compared to where they were to start 2022.
Biggest Losers
Two of the biggest cryptos falling this week are Cardano (ADA) and XRP (XRP) with them dropping 1.5% and 3.5% respectively. Litecoin (LTC) is down just 0.4% but remains one of the few top 25 cryptos by market cap to be down the past seven days.
Branching out to the largest 100 crypto projects, the biggest decliners this week are Axie Infinity (AXIE) and Zcash (ZEC) that are down 7.5% and 6.7% respectively. Axie in particular saw its value plummet following news that a hacker was able to steal more than $600 million from the video game’s network. Perhaps even more baffling is the fact that one of the biggest crypto hacks in history took a few days for anyone to even find out that the sum of $600 million was missing.
Wrapping Up
Cryptocurrencies are seemingly bouncing back after a rough start to 2022 in which most investments suffered during Russia-Ukraine conflicts along with the tightening of monetary policy. The biggest coins and their primary competitors are driving the increase but severe hacks in sizable crypto projects such as Axie leads to many questioning just how secure these cryptocurrencies are as it is not the first hack and certainly won’t be the last.
