It was a painful long weekend in the cryptocurrency space, with global market capitalisation dipping well below the US$1tn barrier where they have remained as of this Tuesday morning.
There have been signs of recovery in the past 24 hours though, given Bitcoin’s 3.2% climb to US$20,400 and Ethereum’s nearly 10% rebound to US$1,580.
Large-cap meme coins DOGE and SHIB were particularly hard hit, with the latter dropping as low as US$6.5bn in market capitalisation from close to US$10bn earlier this month.
Most network tokens have been in recovery mode.
Cardano, Polkadot and Polygon clocked in around 5% gains this morning, while Solana added over 7%.
Total volumes across the decentralised finance (DeFi) space dipped in line with the wider market, heading as low as US$58bn on Sunday before this morning’s 3.8% recovery session.
Lido and Compound Finance added double digits in the past 24 hours, while MakerDAO, Synthetic and Curve all added just under 10%.
In the news
The weekend dip may have been a response to rumours that 140,000 Bitcoins were to be released to creditors of the Mt. Gox exchange, who have been waiting since 2015 to receive their payouts.
However, creditors have confirmed that payouts are yet to materialise, although the repayment plan is now in the early stages.
A whistleblower at Ava Labs – developer of the Avalanche blockchain network – has accused the company of “weaponising the legal system” to attack its rivals.
Ava Labs’ chief executive officer rejected the claims as “conspiracy theory nonsense”.
As part of Argentina’s push for widespread cryptocurrency adoption, citizens in the Mendoza province can now pay pay government fees and taxes using Tether and other stablecoins.