The past seven days were action-packed, and it’s safe to say those interesting developments took place on all fronts. Bitcoin went through considerable volatility, and Terra’s ecosystem in the face of both LUNC and LUNA went on a massive rollercoaster while the Ethereum Merge countdown officially kicked off with the Bellatrix upgrade. Let’s unpack.
Starting with Bitcoin, it got off on the wrong footing. For the first few days of the last week, BTC was rangebound around $20K – a trend that we saw for quite some time before that. On Tuesday, though, the sellers took control and pushed the price towards $18,000.
This level turned out to be pivotal, as it had previously supported the price on three different occasions. Once again, the bulls managed to hold the line and initiated a rebound earlier today. In less than 24 hours, buyers managed to send BTC towards $21K, charting a whopping increase of almost 10%. In doing so, they were able to turn the past seven days green as BTC charted gains close to 5%.
Elsewhere, the Bellatrix upgrade went live on Ethereum’s Beacon chain. This is the last upgrade to take place before the coveted Paris hard fork (more commonly referred to as “the Merge”). Its purpose is to enable validators to start producing updated Beacon Blocks that will contain the codebase for the merging of the two layers – the consensus and the execution layers.
This puts the Merge just right around the corner. According to the latest estimates, it should take place on September 12th. This will officially mark the transition of Ethereum to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm – a feat that no other major cryptocurrency has achieved so far, should it be successful, of course.
The Terra ecosystem also saw a lot of attention in the face of both Luna Classic (the classic version of the cryptocurrency) and the one produced as a result of the hard fork following the collapse – LUNA.
The former (LUNC) is up 67.3% in the past seven days, and the major reason for that is the new staking service that went live on the Terra Classic chain on August 27th, providing investors with a hefty return of about 37% on their stakings, as of the time of this writing.
On the other hand, we have LUNA – the cryptocurrency that’s powering the chain produced after the hard fork. It soared by a whopping 300% today. The interesting part is that this took place in about a couple of hours. After reaching the daily highs, however, the coin retraced to where it’s currently trading at, charting an increase of about 170%, highlighting the tremendous volatility.
All in all, it has been a very eventful week with plenty of excitement in the market. With the Ethereum Merge slated to take place next week, it remains particularly interesting to see how the market will shape up.
Market Cap: $1,087B | 24H Vol: $94B | BTC Dominance: 37.1%
BTC: $21,091 (+4.7%) | ETH: $1,722 (+8.4%) | ADA: $0.495 (+8%)
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