Ethereum and major altcoins take a dive as price remains volatile

ETH alongside Solana, Terra, Cardano and a few other cryptocurrencies have registered major losses over the past week.
- Ethereum's 12-month gains currently stand at 50%.
- Solana has lost approximately 48% of its value since the start of 2022.
- Ukraine's ETH, USDT and BTC donations currently stand at approximately over AUD$54 million.
Ethereum, the world's second largest cryptocurrency by total capitalisation, has continued to track the movements of the crypto market at large, dipping as low as AUD$3,450 after having scaled up to a relative high of AUD$3,600 over the last 24 hours. As a result of its ongoing price volatility, the altcoin is showcasing monthly losses of 15% while trading at a price point of AUD$3,434.
These bearish movements have been spurred by a major meltdown witnessed by the global equities sector, with the market having been on the receiving end of a AUD$3.92 trillion (US$2.9 trillion) wipe-out since the start of the month.
Ethrereum hasn't been the only altcoin to be experiencing such a freefall, with recent investor favourite Solana (SOL) also recording a brutal year-to-date correction of over 48%, resulting in the total cap of the digital asset industry collectively slipping from AUD$3.38 trillion (US$2.5 trillion) to AUD$2.3 trillion (US$1.7 trillion) over the last 60-plus days.
Solana's dismal performance can in large part be attributed to the network facing a total of 6 major outages between Q4 2021 and early 2022. In fact, the most recent incident that took place in January was linked to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, resulting in the platform's dev team having to overhaul its native code structure in a big way.
There have also been fears that Solana is becoming increasingly more centralised. The cost of becoming a validator within the network increased greatly in recent months, allowing only a select few individuals to acquire the recommended hardware (a 12-core 2.8GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, a high-speed 1TB SSD drive and others).
Ukraine's crypto donations continue to increase
Since entering into a full-blown territorial conflict with Russia a little over a week ago, Ukraine has continued to amass the sympathy of people across the globe. Crypto donations sent directly to government-maintained wallets have been able to accumulate approximately AUD$54 million (US$40 million).
Charities such as the Reserve Fund of Ukraine (backed by prominent local crypto exchange Kuna) and Come Back Alive have been able to garner ETH, BTC, USDT donations worth AUD$17.5 million (US$13 million) and AUD9.72 million (US$7.2 million) respectively.
eBay all set to enable crypto payments soon?
eBay CEO Jamie Iannone revealed in a recent interview that his company may be on the verge of integrating crypto payments into its existing financial framework. The firm is also looking at the possibility of creating its own NFT trading ecosystem. However, no specific plans regarding the same were divulged.
Iannone said that eBay has been closely studying the crypto market over the last few years so as to diversify its payment procurement methods. In fact, the company had tried integrating support for BTC payments as far back as 2014.
Interested in cryptocurrency? Learn more about the basics with our beginner's guide to Bitcoin, dive deeper by learning about Ethereum and see what blockchain can do with our simple guide to DeFi.
Disclosure: The author owns a range of cryptocurrencies at the time of writing.