TL;DR
- Bitcoin dropped from $100K to $94,300 before recovering to $96,800. Despite MicroStrategy’s major BTC purchase, $1.4 billion was liquidated across the market.
- Ripple’s XRP slumped below $2 at one point, but analysts remain bullish. Some predict a market cap rise to $270 billion.
- Shiba Inu plunged 25% despite Shibarium reaching 2M wallets and a 1,000% surge in the burn rate, eliminating 51.7M tokens.
BTC’s Price Swings
The past 24 hours have been quite eventful for the cryptocurrency market, which underwent severe correction. Bitcoin (BTC), for instance, lost the $100K psychological level, dropping to as low as $94,300. In the following hours, it recovered some of the losses, currently trading at around $97,000 (per CoinGecko’s data).
It is interesting to mention that the pullback occurred shortly after MicroStrategy announced another multi-billion Bitcoin acquisition. The company’s stash increased to 423,650 BTC (equaling $41 billion at current rates).
Massive purchases of that type reduce the circulating supply of the primary cryptocurrency and might lead to a price rally. As mentioned above, though, this was not the case this time.
Interestingly, BTC performed quite similarly after MicroStrategy’s previous Bitcoin purchase at the end of November. Back then, the asset’s valuation dropped from $98,000 to $92,000.
The latest correction did not affect only BTC, with well-known altcoins such as Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), Solana (SOL), Dogecoin (DOGE), and many more charting substantial losses. As CryptoPotato reported, the crash negatively affected over-leveraged traders, resulting in over $1.4 billion in liquidations on a 24-hour scale.
Optimism Across the XRP Army
As mentioned above, Ripple’s native token is among the worst-affected assets due to the market’s pullback, with its price dipping by 12%. As of writing these lines, it trades at around $2.17, and at one point, it dropped to under $2 on most exchanges.
Still, its current valuation represents a whopping 270% surge on a monthly scale, with numerous analysts envisioning further gains in the near future.
Veteran trader Peter Brandt and X user CRYPTOWZRD claimed that XRP has “the most powerful chart” in the cryptocurrency market. The latter predicted that the token’s market capitalization could soon skyrocket to a new all-time high of $270 billion.
Ali Martinez chipped in, too. He maintained that investors should pray for a retest of $2.25 so they “can buy the dip and target $4.40.”
How’s SHIB Doing?
The meme coin sector is also colored in red today (December 10), with Shiba Inu (SHIB) losing over 15% of its valuation.
Its poor performance comes despite the latest milestone reached by the layer-2 scaling solution Shibarium. As CryptoPotato reported, the number of wallet addresses on the network crossed 2 million. Prior to that, total transactions jumped above 600 million.
Shibarium’s advancement is one factor that could fuel a fresh resurgence for SHIB. Another is the burning mechanism, which aims to reduce the circulating supply and potentially make the meme coin more valuable via scarcity.
In the past 24 hours, the burn rate has exploded above 1,000%, resulting in 51.7 million tokens sent to a null address.
