Price changes and market fluctuation
A meteoric rise of Polkadot (DOT) in the last three days sees its market cap increase from $5.5 billion to $9.4 billion. The past 24 hours shows continued growth, with analytics website Coingecko reporting the market cap to have now grown to $13.7 billion — exceeding that of XRP.
Stellar Lumens (XLM) has re-entered the top 10 cryptocurrency coins. This week, its market cap propelled past $5 billion, correlating with an agreement with the Ukrainian government to implement a functioning central bank digital currency. Currently, the XLM price sits at around $0.22. It may soon return to the dizzy heights of 3 years ago, when the price hit $0.78, fingers crossed.
Ethereum (ETH) is set to pass its ATH, previously set in early 2018. Largely down to the cryptocurrency’s success in paving the way for decentralised finance, and being the highest earning asset of 2020, experts project Ethereum will soon pass its previous all-time-high, predicting the ETH price to double within the next two weeks.
Whales
Leading digital currency investor; Grayscale, has accrued assets that have surpassed $25 billion, increasing over 10x since this time last year. The rapid increase of Bitcoin (BTC) over the past few months has been a large contributor to their recent success, considering Grayscale purchased somewhere in the region of 12,000 BTC (worth $240,000,000) which would have since doubled in value.
Legal
Pro-crypto; Gary Gensler, is set to be the new SEC (US Securities and Exchange Commission) Chairman, according to a report from Reuters. This could see an increase of cryptocurrency usage in the U.S when completing day-to-day transactions.
British bank HSBC has announced that they will not be accepting any cryptocurrency transactions, in addition to restricting what their customers can invest in.
XRP is still in the news this week as both Japan and the UK state that it will not be considered a security, but rather an exchange token. And in the U.S, a major XRP custodian has been officially granted access to become a digital asset bank, completing an agreement with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
Important Information
Cryptocurrencies are generally not regulated and investors do not have access to recourse or compensation schemes such as, for example, in the UK, the Financial Ombudsman Service or the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Investing in cryptocurrencies can be high risk and investors should carefully evaluate their appetite for risk and their understanding of trading cryptocurrencies prior to entering into a transaction.
