Dogecoin and XRP Soar As Market Splits

Over the weekend, the crypto markets were awash with big gains and equally big losses. 

Bitcoin spent the last 24 hours barely moving. At the time of writing, it’s down just 0.10% after the rally and retreat of it’s price after Elon Musk switched his Twitter profile description to just “Bitcoin”.

Ethereum fared slightly worse, dropping 2.3% in the last 24 hours. Still ETH hodlers can’t complain as the network has spent 28 days straight with a closing price above $1,000. 

But as we travel down the cryptocurrency rankings by market cap, the losses and gains get bigger. Ripple is up 31%, after a weekend of supercharged growth that’s effectively doubled the price of XRP. 

Theories abound on the seismic growth, some have suggested it was thanks to Ripple submitting a rebuttal to the SEC, others argue it’s simply being “GameStopped” by a group of investors over on Telegram. 

But XRP wasn’t the only one. Dogecoin, which really has been GameStopped by investors, continued it’s astronomical growth. In the last 24 hours it’s up 40% as the project became a trending topic in several countries.

But it’s not all growth, growth, growth. Projects like Uniswap, the darling of DeFi has slumped 8.6% after breaking all time highs last week. Synthetix is down 6.6%, as are seven other projects in the top 20, according to Nomics. 

It’s odd to see an almost 50/50 split of gains and losses in the top 20. While some of the growth can be attributed to projects being eyed up by institutional investors, Cardano, EOS and Polkadot, for example, others are seeing growth thanks to a return in pump (but not necessarily dump) schemes. 

Tron is up 7% thanks to a mention on the r/wallstreetbets subreddit, with 7.7m users, and other projects are being sucked into the investor-tainment cycle. While GameStop and other companies were reigned in by regulators, there’s nothing stopping people from pumping prices in crypto. Is that a good thing? Probably not. 

Big tech earnings set to dominate Wall Street

It was a rough week on Wall Street. After the GameStop story dominated the headlines, a significant sell-off took place across the markets driving the Dow, the S&P and Nasdaq down for their worst weekly performance in three months. 

“There are a few things that are driving the sell-off,” Tony Roth, CIO of Wilmington Trust, a financial services provider to large financial institutions told Yahoo! Finance. 

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense for the lowest-quality stocks to take off in this manner,” Roth said, in reference to the stocks that rose sharply last week after investors created short squeezes for hedge funds. 

This is creating “systemic fear around the markets” as investors are now wary that their stock of choice may be next in line for communities like r/wallstreetbets. 

As a result, many are hoping earnings reports from the likes of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Amazon will help the markets resume regular scheduled programming. Look out for those on Tuesday.