Bitcoin falls 10% in weekend trade as alts run
Bitcoin has another rough weekend while altcoins enjoy their time in the sun.
- Bitcoin down 10% in another weekend sell-off
- Polkadot and others multiply in price
- Welsh man asks to dig up trash to find 7,500 lost Bitcoin
Bitcoin is trading around US$35,000 at the time of writing and has slightly decreased in the last 24 hours. However, weekend trade tells a story similar to the previous weekend’s Bitcoin trends. The Bitcoin price peak was on Friday at US$39,846 before a protracted sell-off of 10.2%.
Its drop comes amid a sharp rise in the value of altcoin Polkadot which made headlines for flipping XRP to become the crypto market’s fourth largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalisation, even as many other cryptocurrencies also continue to rise.
Polkadot goes up by 166%
The chart below shows the year-to-date performance of Polkadot (purple) compared to XRP (blue), which continues stagnating under delistings and the threat of SEC action.
Polkadot’s native token has had a market-beating week pumping from as low as $7.21 to the week’s high of $19.22. That’s a staggering 166% increase on the week alone. With those numbers, it’s not surprising that DOT has leapfrogged both XRP and Cardano.
These recent price moves now make DOT the fourth largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalisation, below only US Tether, Ethereum and Bitcoin. DOT’s market cap is sitting around $12.09 billion according to data from Coinbase.
Man who put 7,500 Bitcoin in trash offers to donate $70 million for permission to dig at the tip to find lost Bitcoin
IT technician James Howells threw away a hard drive containing 7,500 Bitcoin that he had personally mined in 2011. In 2013, when Bitcoin increased to over $7,000, Howell scoured the tip in an attempt to recover the hard drive according to a CNN report.
Howell refuses to give up on the needle in a haystack venture and has proposed to the Newport City Council a donation of $70 million should he be able to find the digital treasure estimated to be worth over $250 million at today’s prices. However, his requests are being met with refusal over environmental factors and the cost of excavation.
Only time will tell if the treasure will ever be salvaged.
Interested in cryptocurrency? Learn more about the basics with our beginner’s guide to Bitcoin, see how to keep your crypto safe with our end to end guide to cryptocurrency security and dive deeper with our simple guide to DeFi.
Disclosure: The author owns a range of cryptocurrencies at the time of writing
Picture: Getty
