Topline
Terraform Lab’s Luna cryptocurrency is now one of the ten largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, according to CoinGecko, rocketing past popular dog-based meme tokens Shiba Inu and dogecoin despite a market-wide selloff that erased hundreds of billions in value over two days and saw prices of major cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin and cardano, drop double-digit percentages.
Terra’s luna became a top ten cryptocurrency by market cap.
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Key Facts
Terra’s luna was trading at $61.05 a token Monday morning, down nearly 20% from a record high of $77.73 on Sunday but still up 22% over the past seven days, according to CoinGecko.
Luna’s gains mean the token’s market capitalization jumped to around $23.6 billion, overtaking dogecoin to become the tenth most valuable cryptocurrency.
Luna’s soaring value comes amid a widespread selloff that wiped more than $300 billion from the cryptocurrency market in two days.
Luna was one of just two top-20 tokens not pegged to other assets to defy the rout—Polygon’s matic, now the 16th-most valuable cryptocurrency, also gained 7.8% over the last week—with the majority of major tokens down double-digit percentages.
The price of bitcoin, the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency and nearly 40% of the crypto market, fell 16.8% over the last seven days, with ether (down 7.5%), Binance’s BNB (9.9%), solana (10.5%), cardano (19.5%), XRP (21%) and polkadot (28.6%) also plummeting.
Key Background
Cryptocurrencies are a notoriously volatile set of assets and even those at the very top of the market like bitcoin and ether are not immune to wild and rapid fluctuations. Bitcoin, for example, is trading at around $47,600, down from a record high of just over $69,000 a few weeks ago. A good chunk of that was lost in the last week and some top-ten cryptocurrencies—polkadot and solana—shed more than 10% in value over the last 24 hours. The selloff comes amid wider disquiet in stock and cryptocurrency markets following the emergence of the new omicron variant of coronavirus.
Further Reading
$300 Billion Bitcoin And Crypto Price Crash After Stark Fed Warning—Ethereum, BNB, Solana, Cardano And XRP In Free Fall (Forbes)
Stocks Sink As Powell Takes A Rare Pessimistic View On Inflation Amid Omicron Variant (Forbes)
