XRP Soars 8%, Bitcoin Halts Before $17K (Market Watch)

Bitcoin tried to take down $17,000, but was stopped in its tracks as with most previous attempts.

Most altcoins have small losses today, with ETH slipping below $1,200. XRP, on the other hand, has stolen the show with a remarkable 8% daily increase.

Bitcoin Fails Before $17K

After an uncharacteristically quiet weekend where bitcoin mostly hovered around $16,500, the asset headed south on Monday and Tuesday, first falling to $16,000 before plunging to a two-year low of $15,500.

It reacted fairly immediately to multi-year lows and recovered nearly $1,000 in the following hours. This resulted in reclaiming $16,000 and even heading towards $17,000.

However, the bears came out to play yesterday as BTC marched down the latter. As such, they stopped the asset from getting too close to it and pushed it back down to $16,500, where it is now trading as well.

The market value has remained above 315 billion dollars, but the dominance over the alts is down to 38.2%.

Despite being about 75% away from its all-time high last November, some on-chain analysts warned that BTC could still head further south, at least according to UTXO.

Ripple is skyrocketing

The altcoins marked some significant gains recently, but most have turned red now. Ethereum went from under $1,100 to over $1,200 in a matter of days. Now, however, ETH is struggling below the latter after a minor daily retracement.

Binance Coin, Cardano, Polygon, Polkadot, Shiba Inu, OKB and Solana are also slightly in the red from the big alts. LEO has fallen by over 8%. Even Litecoin is down 3.5% on the day after recently charting a six-month high.

Ripple, for its part, has emerged as today’s top performer. XRP is up almost 8% and has reached $40.

With most lower- and mid-cap altcoins losing small amounts of value over the past 24 hours, the cumulative market capitalization of all cryptoassets has fallen by roughly $10 billion to just under $840 billion.