The broader market recovery following the May crash continues with five of the top 10 coins by market cap showing double-digit growth over the past seven days, according to data from CoinMarketCap.com.
Fast facts
- Continuing its historic run, Solana (SOL) showed the most movement, gaining over 45% this past week to hit a new all-time high on Saturday of US$150.19. It was trading at US$145.58 at press time. Along with Cardano, Solana has been marketed as a potential rival to Ethereum — on which the vast majority of decentralized finance is based — and whose recent surge has been attributed to its supporting of non-fungible tokens and its new cross chain bridge Wormhole.
- Solana broke into the crypto top 10 in mid-August and has continued to grow from there, now sitting in seventh position overall, having recently overtaken Dogecoin, with a market cap of US$42,246,147,306.
- Polkadot (DOT) was another big mover in the past week, up over 37% in the last seven days, trading at US$34.44 at press time. This marks the first time the token is trading above the US$30 mark since the crash in May, when it fell from its all-time high of US$47.95 to below US$20 in a matter of days.
- The last major mover was the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum (ETH), which gained over 25% last week to reach US$3,972 over the weekend. This pushes it closer to breaking the US$4,000 mark, considered a significant psychological barrier for the token, as it has only briefly breached that point during the height of the bull run, when it hit US$4,168.70.
- Positive sentiment surrounding several developments on the Ethereum blockchain may be causing this price movement; its London hardfork went live in early August, an important milestone in the network’s transition from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. In preparation for the transition, the network has begun burning Ether that would otherwise be paid to miners as part of Ethereum Improvement Proposal-1559.
- According to ethburned.info, the total amount of ETH burned in this way just crossed over the 210,000 mark, equating to roughly US$715 million.