TL;DR
Ever since the beginning of December, the cryptocurrency market has been booming, indicating that the highly successful year for the industry could have a happy end. Numerous leading digital assets charted yearly highs, whereas the overall bullish sentiment among investors hinted about further surges.
Bitcoin surpassed $44,000 for the first time since the spring of 2022, while the global crypto market capitalization shot above $1.7 trillion (per CoinGecko’s data).
In a sudden twist of events, though, the primary digital asset took a U-turn a few hours ago, with its price dropping below $42,000. This resulted in over $400 million worth of liquidated positions, with BTC trades contributing for over $100 million of that amount.
Still, some on-chain metrics suggest that Bitcoin’s valuation could soon consolidate at its current level. As revealed by CryptoQuant, BTC open interest dropped to almost $10.5 billion on December 10, which usually hints at reduced volatility. In comparison, the metric skyrocketed above $11.6 billion last week.
Despite the ongoing market decline, some assets are still well in the green, with Bonk Inu (BONK) being one example. The Solana memecoin has jumped around 9% in the past 24 hours and a whopping 400% on a monthly basis.
It also hit an all-time high (ATH) price on December 9 when its market capitalization reached almost $900 million.
Currently, BONK is the 83rd largest cryptocurrency in the entire realm, performing much better than the largest memecoins by market cap, such as Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB).
Ripple’s native token – XRP – is another crypto asset that had quite a favorable week. Its price ascended to almost $0.70 over the weekend but dropped significantly over the last 24 hours to its current mark of $0.62.
However, some analysts, including the X (Twitter) users EGRAG CRYPTO and Dark Defender, believe XRP could finish the ongoing year at a higher level. The former claimed the asset might climb to $0.75, whereas the latter sees it jumping toward $0.80 in the following weeks.
Those willing to check additional XRP price forecasts for the short term could take a look at our dedicated video below:
