Bitcoin Hovers Over $3,850 as Most Top Cryptos See Losses

Published at: March 2, 2019

Saturday, March 2 — the top 20 cryptocurrencies are reporting minor to medium losses on the day to press time. Bitcoin (BTC) is hovering just over the $3,850 mark again, according to Coin360 data.

Market visualization from Coin360

At press time, Bitcoin is down little over half of a percent on the day, trading at around $3,858, according to CoinMarketCap data. Looking at its weekly chart, the current price is over 6 percent lower than $4,142, the price at which Bitcoin started the week.

Bitcoin 7-day price chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Ethereum (ETH) is holding its position as the largest altcoin by market cap, which by press time is over $14 billion. The second-largest altcoin, Ripple (XRP), has a market cap of about $13 billion by press time.

ETH is down by 2.5 percent over the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. At press time, ETH is trading around $134, after having started the day at $138. On its weekly chart, Ethereum has seen its value decrease over 15 percent from $157, the price at which the coin started the week.

Ethereum 7-day price chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

This week, Ethereum’s Constantinople and St. Petersburg network upgrades went live on the main network at block 7,280,000.

Ripple has lost about two percent in the 24 hours to press time and is currently trading at around $0.315. On its weekly chart, the coin lost almost five percent from $0.331, the price at which XRP started the week.

Ripple 7-day price chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

This week, the research arm of top crypto exchange Binance published an analysis of JPMorgan Chase's recently announced inter-bank stablecoin, arguing that the digital coin brings “minimal direct competition” to XRP, for now.

Among the top 20 cryptocurrencies, the ones experiencing the most notable losses on the day are Eos (EOS) and Tron (TRX), both down around four percent by press time.

The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies currently amounts to $130.1 billion — which is about 7.5 percent less than $140.6 billion, the value reported one week ago.

As Cointelegraph recently reported, the United States Federal Reserve is considering the inclusion of this year’s Bitcoin market collapse as one of the “salient risks” to be taken into account for its supervisory stress tests.

This week, intergovernmental organization the Financial Action Task Force published preliminary guidelines for cryptocurrencies.

Yesterday, blockchain development company Blockstream released a new version of its Bitcoin scalability software, Lightning Network implementation, c-lightning.