Bitcoin Fails to Conquer $30K, Ethereum PoS Merge on Ropsten Testnet Successful: This Week’s Crypto Recap

The week, eventful as it was, failed to result in a decisive change in any direction. The market is more or less at the same level it was seven days ago, registering a slight decrease.

Starting with Bitcoin, cryptocurrency went on a roller coaster over the last week. Seven days ago, it was trading at around the same level it is right now – $29,500. However, come Monday morning, BTC started soaring, reaching as high as $31,500 but failing to contest the $32K level. At this point, sellers stepped up and pushed the price back towards $30K on Tuesday.

The next day, the bulls gave it another go and once again tested the critical $32K level. Unfortunately, they were unable to conquer it, eventually losing the battle and even forfeiting $30K as the cryptocurrency is presently trading below.

The rest of the market is also painted red. Ethereum is down 4.9% on the week. However, from a fundamental standpoint, the situation is looking promising for ETH. Developers were successful in merging the Proof of Stake consensus algorithm to the Ropsten testnet – a considerable step forward towards ETH 2.0.

BNB is down 3.9%, XRP is down 3.8%, SOL – 6.2%, DOT – 10%, and so forth. Cardano is the only top 10 cryptocurrency that didn’t chart a decline, but it’s only up some 1% at the time of this writing.

At the same time, Bitcoin’s dominance – the way to gauge its share relative to that of the rest of the market – increased by some 0.3%. This shows that BTC managed to perform better than altcoins price-wise.

There were some other interesting developments over the past week. Stablecoin leader – Tether (USDT) – launched on Tezos, causing a considerable surge in the price of its native cryptocurrency – XTZ. Apart from that, Sir Anthony Hopkins also jumped on the bandwagon of non-fungible tokens and even asked Snoop Dogg and Jimmy Fallon for some advice.

It remains interesting to see how the next seven days will shape the cryptocurrency market and if this choppy sideways action will continue.

Market Data

Market Cap: $1,267B | 24H Vol: $65B | BTC Dominance: 44.5%

BTC: $29,597 (-1.9%) | ETH: $1,742 (-4.9%) | ADA: $0.59 (+1%)

10.06

This Week’s Crypto Headlines You Can’t Miss

Do Kwon and Terraform Labs Must Comply With the SEC Investigation After Losing Appeal Case. Do Kwon and Terraform Labs continue facing massive scrutiny from various authorities. The US and South Korea are the latest to push as a court ruling granted an application by the US SEC to order the company and its co-founder to comply with subpoenas.

Oscar-Winning Actor Anthony Hopkins Asked Snoop Dogg and Jimmy Fallon About NFTs. Legendary Oscar-winning actor Sir Anthony Hopkins is venturing into NFTs. He asked the rapper Snoop Dogg and late-night show host Jimmy Fallon for advice.

ApeCoin is Not Moving Away From the Ethereum Ecosystem, Yet. Despite talks of departing from Ethereum, a community proposal was firm on the fact that ApeCoin should remain on the network and also take advantage of a layer-2 scaling solution.

20 Million Optimism Tokens (OP) Swiped After a Transfer Error. Shortly after its official release, Optimism – the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution – was exploited for 20 million tokens. The team has already reached out to the hacker and is expecting assistance, or it will be contacting relevant authorities.

Stablecoin Leader Tether (USDT) Launches on Tezos Blockchain. The leading stablecoin – USDT – launched on the Tezos Blockchain. This also caused XTZ – the native cryptocurrency of the network – to skyrocket to a monthly high following the news.

Ethereum Proof of Stake Merge Goes Live on Ropsten Testnet. Ethereum’s oldest testnet – Ropsten – is now using a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm to generate its blocks, moving away from proof-of-work mining. This comes in growing anticipation of the upcoming mainnet merge of ETH 2.0.