There were several big moves in the cryptocurrency markets on Wednesday. Bitcoin (BTC-USD) hasn’t changed too much, but some of the others have. Ethereum (ETH-USD) rose to another all-time high, and bitcoin cash (BCH-USD) is up by 12% on the day. Meanwhile, some of the alt-coins that saw the biggest gains in 2017 and the first week of 2018 are plunging again.
Today’s cryptocurrency prices, Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018. Here’s a look at the 10 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, and how much each has changed over the past 24 hours.
Image source: Getty Images.
Cryptocurrency Name (Code)
Price in U.S.
Dollars
Day’s Change
Bitcoin (BTC-USD)
$14,239.00
(2.
8%)
Ethereum (ETH-USD)
$1,283.80
5.3%
Ripple (XRP-USD)
$1.91
(13.
5%)
Bitcoin Cash (BCH-USD)
$2,678.80
12%
Cardano (ADA-USD)
$0.77
(10.2%)
Litecoin (LTC-USD)
$243.
72
(3.3%)
NEM (XEM-USD)
$1.35
(15.3%)
IOTA (IOT-USD)
$3.58
0.
7%
Stellar (XLM-USD)
$0.54
(11.3%)
Dash (DASH-USD)
$1,064
(4.5%)
Data source: www.investing.
com. Prices and daily changes as of 3:30pm EST, and prices are rounded to the nearest cent where appropriate.
After dropping below $14,000 earlier on Wednesday, bitcoin recovered and is just slightly off. Ethereum (ETH-USD) continues its big rally, hitting yet another all-time high on Wednesday, topping out above $1,400 before pulling back a bit. For the past week, Ethereum is up by about 60%, and over the past year, the second largest cryptocurrency is up more than 13,000%.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH-USD) is the day’s top performer, up by 12% as of this writing.
Coinbase has blamed “heavy market buy demand” for the technical difficulties experienced in December, when Bitcoin Cash was first made available on the exchange. In a blog post , Coinbase exchange GDAX’s general manager Adam White said that 90% of the requests shortly after the bitcoin cash launch were buy requests.
Another rough day for alt-coins To be clear, not all alternative cryptocurrencies, or alt-coins, are having a bad day. However, the coins that started 2018 with the highest momentum, such as Ripple (XRP-USD), Cardano (ADA-USD), NEM (XEM-USD), Stellar (XLM-USD), and Tron (TRX-USD), which has now fallen out of the top 10, are all down by double digits today.
This could be profit-taking, as all of the coins I just named were up significantly in recent weeks and months, or it could simply be that investor interest is fizzling out. All of these alt-coins are intended to solve some of bitcoin’s problems that prevent it from becoming a mainstream method of transferring money.
Although some of them, like Ripple (XRP-USD), have gotten some serious traction within the financial industry, it’s possible that the valuations just got a little ahead of themselves.
Bitcoin ETFs hit a roadblock Several companies attempting to launch exchange-traded funds , or ETFs, based on bitcoin suddenly withdrew their applications. Direxion, which had applied to launch five leveraged and/or inverse bitcoin ETFs, said the SEC staff “expressed concerns regarding the liquidity and valuation of the underlying instruments in which the fund intends to primarily invest and requested that the trust withdraw the amendment until such time as those concerns are resolved.
”
In simple English, the funds planned to use bitcoin futures to achieve their desired results, and the SEC is worried that there isn’t enough of a liquid market in the recently launched futures just yet to justify ETFs based on them.
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