Despite the fact that Bitcoin continues to break its highs these Christmas days, during the week of December 20 to 27 the market records ups and downs. About 80% of altcoins experience declines in their prices. Only a small group of cryptocurrencies show growth in percentages close to 18%, according to statistics from Live Coin Watch.
The most appreciated cryptocurrencies in these seven days are led by Decred (DCR) that just concluded a hackathon in Latin America and Litecoin (LTC) which follows a rise paired with Bitcoin.
The list of crypto assets for the week is completed with Monero (XMR) and his progress on a project for exchanges with BTC; and Dogecoin (DOGE), the price of which was boosted by a tweet from Elon Musk.
Bitcoin, for its part, plays a prominent role these days with its constant rise in price. Cryptocurrency continues to exceed its historical milestones. In this way, in the current Christmas context, it has reached over USD 27,000, at times reaching $ 28,000. On average, the cryptocurrency increased about 13.9% in these seven days.
As published by CriptoNoticias, among the reasons that could be associated with this new upward momentum, are the 80,000 option contracts of the Deribit exchange house, for 1.85 billion dollars, whose expiration is scheduled for December 25.
Additionally, the day before that date the exchange house introduced a “strike” or bet that the price of bitcoin will reach or exceed $ 100,000 by September 2021. Demand for these types of options was overwhelming, Deribit said on Twitter. He added the next two days similar bets for $ 120,000 and $ 140,000, although he has not specified the expiration date of the latter.
Ether (ETH), on the other hand, also gains value and registers an average increase of 6.2%. The price ranged between USD 574 and USD 700, a maximum price that reached this December 27 and which it had not reached since May 2018.
By the 22nd, the co-founder of the network, Vitalik Buterin, said that the participation of the community in the staking of Ethereum 2.0 was higher than expected. In a virtual meeting, he made reference to the people and entities that became validators in the new version of the blockchain, after depositing 32 ethers (ETH) in the smart contract. In total deposits exceeded 1 billion dollars.
Meanwhile, the prices of other relevant cryptocurrencies in the market show ups and downs. Litecoin (LTC) rises more than 14% and is located for the second consecutive week in the weekly top. Something different happened with Ethereum Classic (ETC), which fell 11.7% during the week; and Ripple’s XRP which depreciated by 48%.
Decred closes the year with hackathon and new privacy features
Decred en Español and the Talent Land Latin America event team recently concluded the Blockchain Learning Challenge hackathon. A few days ago they did delivery of about USD 2,500 in prizes (in DCR) to the participants from Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Argentina. The competition was held over the course of a month (ending this December), a period that coincided with the launch of Decred’s new DEX, DCRDEX.
In this context, the weekly growth of DCR, the native cryptocurrency of the blockchain, exceeded 18% in the last seven days. The details and implications of the hackathon, along with a number of new implementations on the platform, are seen by Decred as the main drivers of DCR price that this December 27 it was quoted at a maximum of USD 40.25.
In this regard, both in its most recent report and in the periodic meetings that the team organizes to share with its community, the fact that the price of DCR has risen 100% in the last month alone.
According to Decred, the influx of the public to its decentralized exchange is joined by the new function included in the recent update “Decrediton v1.6”. This is CoinShuffle ++, with which it is added the ability to send private transactions on the network.
DCR’s market capitalization is USD 484.6 million and daily trade volume is USD 9.7 million.
Decred has added new features in the last month and the price of DCR has gone up 100%. Source: Live Coin Watch.
Litecoin maintains growth in parallel to Bitcoin
Although no precise information has been released to explain Litecoin’s price surge, analysts make the argument that the cryptocurrency’s growth follows a recurring trend to pair with Bitcoin. In this framework, LTC ranks in the weekly top for the second week in a row, with an average rise of 14.5%.
On this topic, Quantify Crypto, a market research and analysis website, posted a tweet on December 19 noting that many technical indicators for Litecoin are bullish. This seemed obvious to them, considering the superior performance of Litecoin in the last weeks. This compared to most altcoins, whose prices have fallen over the course of these seven days while Bitcoin has risen.
Since the 25th the value of LTC remains at the threshold of 130 dollars. It reaches a peak of USD 137 on December 27, matching the maximum it reached in 2019.
Litecoin creator Charlie Lee also commented on his Twitter account. He highlighted LTC’s value proposition, mentioning the high liquidity, its inclusion in the PayPal payment platform, and the high price of Litecoin Trust (LTCN) offerings by asset manager Grayscale.
As of press time, LTC’s market capitalization is $ 8,789 million and 24-hour trading volume is $ 5,218 million.
Litecoin outperforms most altcoins amid Bitcoin’s steady rise. Source: Live Coin Watch.
Atomic swap project between Monero and Bitcoin advances
On December 24, the Monero team highlighted on Twitter the progress of Farcaster, a project by implementation of atomic swaps (atomic swap) between Monero and Bitcoin, funded by the community. This, while XMR is placed in the top of the cryptocurrencies of the week with an advance of 5.4%.
The Monero developers have been working on Farcaster since last November. As they explain, this first phase of the project involves the collection of requests for comments (RFCs) to formalize the structure of the project. All of these RFCs, the team clarifies, will cover the high-level overview of the different parts of the project and how they will interact with each other.
Taking into account some of the feedback received so far, “We spent time figuring out how to use Taproot outputs and Schnorr signatures to improve the privacy of exchanges,” say the developers on Reddit. Meanwhile, analyst Justin Ehrenhofer highlighted on Twitter the fact that Monero is on track to achieve its highest number of monthly transactions so far, between 550,000 and 650,000.
The value of Monero has increased substantially since December 23. After some corrections it rises again and reaches a peak of USD 170 on December 27. As of this writing, XMR’s market capitalization is $ 2.87 billion and its daily trade volume is $ 183,393.
The Farcaster project for XMR / BTC exchanges is in its first phase of request for comments. Source: Live Coin Watch.
Dogecoin price skyrockets after Elon Musk tweet
On December 20 Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, published a tweet to talk about cryptocurrencies. With a single message and few words seems to have influenced the value of Dogecoin, sparking an unexpected reaction: the cryptocurrency soared by almost 30% shortly after the message was broadcast. Although the price has been falling in the following days, on average DOGE grew 5% in seven days.
Musk first wrote “Bitcoin is my safe word.” Moments later he clarified the idea by saying “Just kidding, who needs a safe word anyway.” He then expressed his disdain for the pioneering cryptocurrency. “Bitcoin is almost as bullshit as fiat money.”
He then posted another tweet with a short sentence, in direct reference to Dogecoin, “One word: Doge.” With this he made his bet (ironic or not) seen towards the cryptocurrency that was created from a meme. Shortly after that tweet the price of DOGE skyrocketed and reached a peak of $ 0.0053 on December 21.
Musk did not say more about cryptocurrencies or invite investment, but briefly changed his Twitter bio by adding “Former CEO of Dogecoin.” DOGE’s market capitalization is USD 558 million and the daily trade volume is USD 59 million.
This week DOGE was prompted by comments from businessman Elon Musk. Source: Live Coin Watch.