Bitcoin price update: Top 5 cryptocurrencies in the red
After meteoric rises over recent months, the leading cryptocurrencies are cooling on price.
Key takeaways
- Top cryptocurrencies are in the red after a period of hypergrowth over two months.
- Elon Musk causes a stir sharing a tweet exchange with Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy.
- Ledger, a leading crypto-wallet manufacturer, becomes the victim of a massive data breach with the personal information of thousands published.
Bitcoin has continued to contract after yesterday’s $1,000 drop. The maiden cryptocurrency is currently selling for $23,125 at the time of writing, down 4.3% over 24 hours going as low as $22,178.
Ethereum, the second largest altcoin by market capitalization, has lost 7.12% on the day, trading hands at around $609.
All of the top 20 cryptocurrencies are in the red today with Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash being the biggest losers of the top five. They’ve both lost ground to the tune of 12.5% with asking prices of $103 and $314 respectively, according to Gemini Exchange.
XRP, the flagship cryptocurrency of Ripple Labs, is the best of bad performers only having lost 1.57% of gains. XRP’s overall gain from only two months ago has been significant. Moving from only $0.24 on November 3, 2020, the central bank favorite moved higher over the course of the next two months rocketing as high as $0.72 briefly on November 25 for an increase of exactly 200%.
According to data found on CoinGecko, XRP’s market capitalization has increased from $8.3 billion on January 1, 2020 to now be sitting at over $25.2 billion representing 203% growth in that time period to today.
Tesla’s Elon Musk contemplates Bitcoin switch
Elon Musk has caused a stir posting a risqué meme on Twitter. A conversation between Musk and Michael Saylor (MicroStrategy CEO) followed with Saylor asserting that if Musk wanted to do his shareholders a “favor” that he should convert Tesla’s finances to Bitcoin. Saylor, whose firm MicroStrategy continues to convert its US dollar treasuries to Bitcoin, added that other S&P 500 firms would follow in time and it would become a “$1 trillion favor”.
As of December 21, 2020, Saylor’s MicroStrategy controls a total of around 70,470 Bitcoin. That figure was amassed for a purchase price of $1.125 billion averaging out to $15,964 per Bitcoin.
If you want to do your shareholders a $100 billion favor, convert the $TSLA balance sheet from USD to #BTC. Other firms on the S&P 500 would follow your lead & in time it would grow to become a $1 trillion favor.
— Michael Saylor (@michael_saylor) December 20, 2020
In May of 2020, Elon Musk replied to a tweet by J.K. Rowling, famed author of the Harry Potter series. In that exchange, Musk was critical of many central banks around the world who had begun quantitative easing in response to COVID-19. He suggested that the action by central banks was making an Internet “ghost money” look solid.
Pretty much, although massive currency issuance by govt central banks is making Bitcoin Internet 👻 money look solid by comparison
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 15, 2020
Crypto wallet hack sends the market into a tailspin
One of the top cryptocurrency wallet manufacturers has had a security failure. Ledger’s database was hacked in June of 2020 with the personal information of thousands of customers leaked, and some even receiving threats of extortion and violence for the cryptocurrency they hold.
The data containing personal information was initially sold before being dumped publicly on RaidForums yesterday. The information on RaidForums reads: “In June 2020, the hardware crypto wallet manufacturer Ledger suffered a data breach that exposed over 1.3 million email addresses, physical addresses, names and phone numbers.”
This will be bad news for Ledger at a time of massive growth in the sector. There is no doubt that the security breach will advantage Trezor, which is Ledger’s only real competition in the industry.
Bitcoin was trading at $23,125 at the time of writing.
Interested in cryptocurrency? Learn more about Bitcoin with our beginner’s guide to Bitcoin, see how to keep your crypto safe with our review of cryptocurrency wallets and dive deeper with our Cryptocurrency learning hub.
