Monday, Aug. 26 — Top cryptocurrencies Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and XRP are in the red. After trading sideways for most of the day, the market is currently seeing minor losses.
Market visualization. Source: Coin360
Bitcoin price is trading at $10,350 at press time — a 1.72% price decrease on the day. BTC has been mostly trading between $10,000 and $10,800 over the past seven days, with its current price sitting right in the middle of those two price points.
Bitcoin 7-day price chart. Source: Coin360
BTC also recently achieved a new record, hitting a realized market capitalization of $100 billion for the first time as of Sunday. This metric can be obtained multiplying the price of each Bitcoin last traded by the size of each trade.
Today is the first day of major cloud computing and virtual machine company VMWare’s annual conference in San Francisco, and its CEO has spoke out against Bitcoin’s impact on the environment as well as its purported main use being crime.
At press time, the top altcoin Ether is trading over $188 and has decreased by 2.46% on the day. The Ethereum Foundation recently announced that it is allocating over $2.46 million in grants for dev teams to create Ethereum 2.0 testnets. Nine different companies and researchers will be the beneficiaries of these funds.
Ether 7-day price chart. Source: Coin360
XRP, the second-largest altcoin by market cap, is trading at $0.269 and has decreased by 2.97% on the day as of publishing time. The head of social impact at Ripple, the cryptocurrency firm that issues the token XRP, recently stated that universities need to start offering blockchain and digital asset courses to train new talent for the industry. Specifically, he said that companies need both blockchain engineers as well senior employees that can make informed business decisions regarding blockchain solutions.
XRP 7-day price chart. Source: Coin360
The crypto market is largely trading sideways or sloping downward, although one of the top gainers on the day is Unus Sed Leo (LEO), boasting a price of $1.18 and a modest gain of approximately 1.8% on the day. LEO is a utility token issued by the major crypto exchange Bitfinex. In its white paper, LEO is described as “a utility token at the heart of the iFinex ecosystem.”
The biggest loser on the day is privacy-focused coin Monero (XMR), which is down over 4% to trade at $79.44 at press time.
The total market cap of the top 100 cryptocurrencies is $270 billion at press time, according to data from Coin360.