Cryptos Freefall Wipes Billions But El Salvador Keeps Buying, Problems for SundaeSwap

After an optimistic post last week, when it seemed like cryptocurrencies were starting to recover again, the crypto market has taken a turn for the worse (or for the better if you want to buy the dip). Every cryptocurrency in the top 100 market capitalization list fell over the last seven days, except for stablecoins and a few currencies that maintained roughly the same value.

The currencies that bore the brunt of the fall are all more obscure coins. POKT fell by 54.8%, CRV by 45.3%, and GALA by 44.4%. However, this doesn’t mean that the big names fared much better. 

ETH’s value dropped by 27.6%, and BTC by 18.5% — not the worst of the bunch, but still pretty stark price decreases. Other notable falls include: SOL by 34.9%, DOT by 34.8%, SHIB by 30.6%, LTC by 26.4%, and DOGE by 25.4%. So, if your approach to the markets involves trying to buy when prices are low, you know what to do.

I wasn’t joking when I said that last week’s market saw dips all around, so there’s not much to say regarding price increases. CDAI increased 0.2% and CUSDC by 0.4%, but that’s about it from the non-stablecoins — and we’re hardly talking about all-time highs here.

The crash has wiped out hundreds of billions from the crypto market, and it’s even done some serious damage to the net worths of figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Bitcoin is now heading for its worst week in eight months due to the continued losses.

But why are prices falling? Some believe it could be at least partly due to the news that Russia’s central bank is allegedly planning to ban cryptocurrencies. A country as big as Russia planning to ban cryptocurrencies would always be bad news, but this is even worse when you consider that lots of mining takes place in the nation. A similar fall happened when China banned cryptocurrencies in 2021.

The stock market has also dropped significantly over the last few weeks, which is likely to have impacted the crypto market too. Although cryptocurrencies like to position themselves as an alternative to traditional finance, the truth is that many major companies and banks are now involved in crypto in some way, making the two markets more linked.

However, not everyone has been fazed by the drops. It seems that El Salvador can always be relied on to be bullish about bitcoin, with the nation’s President buying even more of the cryptocurrency. President Nayib Bukele has bought 410 more bitcoins, worth a total of $15 million. The country also plans to launch a bitcoin bond this year, which is one of many bitcoin-related plans the nation has.

If you’ve spent any time on Twitter over the last year or so, you’ll know how much of a trend it is for users to set NFTs as their profile pictures — and that it’s become a running joke for other users to simply right click and save those pictures. However, it seems that Twitter has decided it’s time to do something about the issue, as it’s now introduced a verification method to check that users putting NFTs as their profile picture actually own the artwork. As a result, Twitter uses will have to link their Ethereum wallets to their account.

Decentralized exchange SundaeSwap, which is the first of its kind that is run on Cardano, went live last week — but it’s already run into problems. Many users have complained about not being able to receive the tokens they were owed in swaps. SundaeSwap has responded by explaining that it saw too much traffic and the network struggled to keep up, but it’s not a good look for the exchange’s launch.

At the time of writing, Tim Thomas holds no positions in the cryptocurrencies mentioned. Wealth of Geeks has no positions in the cryptocurrencies mentioned. WoG has a disclosure policy.

This post was produced by Timothy Thomas Limited and was syndicated by Wealth of Geeks. 

Featured image credit: Unsplash