In brief
- The cryptocurrency market has shed almost 6% of its value today, with its total market cap dropping below $1 trillion.
- Ethereum is down nearly 10% today after a week of strong gains, with Solana and Polygon among other notable coins in the red.
Following a week of gains across much of the cryptocurrency market, prices are sinking again—and the overall market cap has slipped below $1 trillion for the first time in several days as Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other top coins lose some of their recent gains.
As of this writing, the overall cryptocurrency market is worth $994 billion based on the combined value of all coins tracked by CoinGecko, a popular crypto price tracker. It’s down nearly 6% on the day, marking the first drop below the $1 trillion mark since July 17.
Ethereum (ETH) is the biggest loser in the top 10 coins by market cap, per the site, dropping 10% over the past 24 hours to a current price of $1,366.
It’s a stark reversal from last week, when Ethereum was the largest gainer among top coins, apparently due in part to increasing certainty over the timing of the “merge,” an upgrade that is expected to reduce transaction costs for network users and potentially decrease the available supply of ETH.
Ethereum has now shed 13% of its value over the last seven days.
Solana (SOL) is down nearly 8% at a current price of $35 per coin, while Cardano (ADA) has lost 6% of its value today at $0.45 per coin. Bitcoin (BTC) hasn’t seen quite as large of a drop today, dropping almost 5% to a price of $20,928 per coin, but it’s down about 7% on the week.
Outside of the top 10 coins, DeFi tokens—the sort used in non-custodial borrowing, lending, and trading apps—are seeing serious declines over the past day, as Decrypt covered earlier this morning. Lido DAO’s token (LDO) has lost 17% of its value today at a current price of $1.30, while Uniswap’s token (UNI) has fallen over 14% to a price of $6.25.
Notable gaming and metaverse tokens are also losing price traction today, with ApeCoin (APE) down 12% to $5.47, The Sandbox’s SAND token losing 9% at $1.14, and Axie Infinity’s AXS governance token down about 8% to $14.63. And MATIC, the native token of Ethereum sidechain Polygon, has dropped in value nearly 11% today at a current price of $0.73.
The crypto market is still reeling from a major market crash that began in May amid poor macroeconomic conditions in other financial markets, plus the collapse of the Terra (LUNA) cryptocurrency and its paired UST stablecoin.
Many coins have fallen sharply in recent months, and are well off their all-time high prices—Bitcoin is down nearly 70% from its peak, for example, with Ethereum at 72%. Both highs were set last November, when the overall crypto market briefly touched the $3 trillion mark for the first time ever.