Altcoin Prices Increasing, While Bitcoin Struggles Below $19,000

The top-performing cryptocurrency to date, Bitcoin, has struggled to keep the upwards momentum and fell into severe volatility over the weekend. After reaching a high of $18,800, Bitcoin lost over $1,000 to trade as low as $17,700. The reason behind Bitcoin’s severe price swings is the huge sell-off in the Bitcoin market on November 22nd. However, bulls quickly mitigated the consequences of the drop, boosting the price per BTC back to around $18,500.

The price volatility, however, didn’t seem to upset the movements in the altcoin sector, as cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Ripple, and Cardano saw a surge in prices. Ethereum, for example, managed to spike over $590, bringing another 7%, while Ripple added 4% to trade above $0.45. Other altcoins like Bitcoin Cash (1%), Binance Coin (1%), Chainlink (1%), Polkadot (3%), and Litecoin (3.5%) also saw an increase in interest.

The primary reason for Ethereum’s price increase may be associated with the ongoing staking process on Ethereum’s ETH 2.0 staking deposit contract. Deposits for Bitcoin’s runner-up reached 305,920 ETH, which resembles 58,6% of the total amount of 500,000 ETH needed for launching ETH 2,0’s beacon chain. The much-anticipated Ethereum network update is scheduled to go live on December 1, or seven days after the needed numbers of tokens for staking are collected.

Cardano, however, stands out from the altcoin pack as prices per ADA token surged over 20% to clock in at a little over $0.15. Over the past few days, Cardano barely managed to stay above $0.10. Joining ADA in the double-digit price increase club, are Waves with 37% in the green, followed by Horizen with 30%, Numeraire with 20%, VeChain with 12%, Yearn.Finance with 11% and Celo with 10%.

However, Bitcoin’s six-week price rally managed to push the price per BTC up by almost 78 percent, due to a strong wave of institutional support. Asset management company Pantera Capital stated that payment processing company PayPal allegedly bought over 100% of the freshly-mined Bitcoins, which in turn leads to supply shortage in both domestic and institutional markets. Also, the supply shortage acts as a scarcity boost for Bitcoin’s price. 

Furthermore, top strategists from ARK Invests, JPMorgan, and Blackrock showed their support for Bitcoin as an anti-inflation tool, hedged against the oversupplied U.S. Dollar, as well as a safe haven asset, which can outperform gold in the long-term, which would streamline Bitcoin as a go-to crisis hedge.