Markets: Bitcoin, Ether fall; Solana show steep loss

Markets: Bitcoin, Ether fall; Solana, Cardano show bigger losses

Bitcoin and Ether fell on Thursday morning in Asia, along with most top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Solana lost 11% of its value, the steepest drop on that list, followed by Cardano and Polkadot.

See related article: Biggest blockchain trends for 2023 and beyond

Fast facts

Bitcoin lost 0.98% to US$16,552.32 in the 24 hours to 8 a.m. in Hong Kong, with Ether falling 1.87% to trade at US$1,190, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Bitcoin price has staggered below the US$17,000 mark for most of December, still reeling from the ongoing FTX.com bankruptcy proceedings and expectations of more interest rate hikes to come.
The global cryptocurrency market capitalization was down 1.55% to US$794.72 billion, while the total crypto trading volume grew by 11.59% to US$30.79 billion.
Solana lost 11.96% to US$9.76, part of a 19.5% drop over the past seven days. Earlier this week, two major non-fungible token (NFT) collections in its ecosystem, DeGods and Y00ts, announced that they will be migrating to Ethereum and Polygon in the coming year.
Solana has also been affected FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s fall from grace, as he was a prominent and outspoken supporter of the blockchain. Compared to the start of 2022, Solana has lost nearly 95% of its value, now out of the top 10 cryptocurrencies list.
Cardano fell 4.58% to US$0.2485, Polkadot lost 4.35% to trade at US$4.29, and Dogecoin slipped 4.5% to US$0.07. Other top 10 cryptocurrencies were also in the loss column except for TRON, which was up 0.09%.
Kraken, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, announced Wednesday that it will no longer continue operations in Japan, blaming the currently weak crypto market globally.
U.S. equities finished lower on Wednesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 1.1%, the S&P 500 Index closed down 1.2%, and the Nasdaq Composite Index fell 1.35%.

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