Polygon, Polkadot and ICP Fall 10% As Altcoins Take a Price Hit

By Tim Hakki

Polkadot, Chainlink, Polygon and ICP all took losses on or near 10% overnight as the global crypto market lost 4.6% of its market cap in 24 hours. 

ICP took the biggest hit according to data aggregator Nomics. Dfinity’s ambitious project, the blockchain based ‘Internet Computer’ that hopes to compete with the $370 billion cloud computing industry, has been in freefall since launch. It declined in value a further 15% overnight, trading at $56.64 at the time of writing. 

That’s a long way off its former (and very brief) all-time high of $700 on launch day.

Polygon dives

Other losses in the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization were less severe, but no less pronounced. Polygon (MATIC), fell 10% to trade at $1.2. Bad news for the Mark Cuban-backed Indian crypto startup, which has been working to scale faster than Ethereum.

Ethereum, the second biggest blockchain after Bitcoin, processes over 1.1 million transactions a day. That’s way off centralized non-crypto alternatives, like Visa’s payments network, capable of processing 150 million transaction a day. Ethereum’s scalability bottleneck has inspired a few projects hoping to solve the issue. Polygon and Cardano are two of the best-known blockchains trying to beat Ethereum at its own game.

Last month, Google added Polygon to its BigQuery service, enabling users access to detailed analytics relating to the network. Two days ago, Polygon announced that, together with DeFi protocol 0x, it is spending $10.5 million to get users onto the Polygon network. 0x’s own native token also took a hit today. It’s down 7% to trade at 86 cents. 

Chainlink and Polkadot - the nine percenters

Finally, the prices of Chainlink and Polkadot both dropped by 9% in the last 24 hours. Chainlink currently trades at $21.05 while Polkadot is at $20.59. Yesterday’s news that Polkadot plans to build ‘cross-chain bridges’ for greater interoperability between blockchains has done little to curb today’s downturn.

The two leading cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, enjoy a position of relative comfort today. Bitcoin fell almost 5% overnight to hit $35.6k, while Ethereum sank a modest 3%, landing on $2,390.

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