After heading toward $100,000 yesterday, bitcoin’s price has taken another wrong turn as the asset has lost over three grand since then.

The altcoins are also deep in the red, with massive daily price declines from the likes of SOL, DOGE, ADA, AVAX, LINK, SHIB, and many others.

BTC’s Short-Term Recovery

Although the business week started quite spectacularly for BTC, whose price skyrocketed from $101,000 to a new all-time high of over $108,000 by Tuesday, it actually turned sour on Wednesday after the latest US FOMC meeting.

The primary cryptocurrency began a massive correction that culminated on Friday with a price slump to around $92,000. Thus, the asset had lost more than $16,000 in just 72 hours.

At this point, the bulls finally managed to halt the freefall and helped BTC climb to $95,000. It kept going north on Saturday morning and jumped to $99,600. As the community was preparing for a potential challenge for the six-digit mark, bitcoin’s trajectory reversed once gain.

BTC started to lose value once again and dropped to just under $96,000 hours ago. Despite being above that line now, bitcoin is still 2% down on the day.

Its market capitalization struggles to remain above $1.9 trillion, while its dominance over the alts has risen to 55% as most altcoins have suffered a lot more.

Alts Back in Red

Yesterday’s brief relief was halted as the altcoin market is back in red again. Ethereum failed at $3,500 and has slumped to $3,350 after a 3.5% daily decline. XRP was stopped ahead of $2.4 and has slipped to $2.24 now.

Even more painful daily declines are evident from SOL, DOGE, ADA, AVAX, LINK, SHIB, XLM, DOT, HBAR, APT, ICP, AAVE, and CRO, with losses of up to 11% in the case of APT.

The total crypto market cap has shed another $100 billion in a day and is down to $3.460 trillion on CG.

TL:DR;

• Ripple’s cross-border token took the recent market-wide meltdown quite badly, with its price dumping from over $2.7 to under $2 within days.
• The asset has recovered some ground but now sits at a pivotal level that will determine whether it resumes its bull run or slips once again.

The start of the business week was quite bullish for XRP as the company behind it announced on Monday that its long-anticipated stablecoin will be officially released for trading on the next day.

XRP went on a massive run, surging from under $2.4 to above $2.7 by the time the launch date arrived. However, it reversed its trajectory shortly after, and the broader market’s collapse took it south hard.

In fact, Ripple’s token came crashing by 28% from the aforementioned local peak to $1.96. Many XRP whales used this opportunity to stack up on more tokens, which perhaps helped the asset recover some ground as it pumped to almost $2.4 yesterday.

Nevertheless, it has lost its momentum once again and now struggles to remain above $2.2. According to popular crypto analyst Ali Martinez, this level is particularly significant for XRP’s future price movements.

If it manages to maintain it, the token could resume its recent bullish activities and head toward $2.7 once again. In contrast, it risks falling beneath $2 for the third time in December if it breaks below it.

If $XRP can hold above $2.20, it might consolidate for a while before taking another shot at the $2.70 resistance. But if the $2.20 support breaks, a downswing to $1.96 becomes imminent. pic.twitter.com/cdtdtSwzKy

— Ali (@ali_charts) December 21, 2024

XRP indeed slipped below that line to $2.17 earlier today but managed to bounce off, at least for now. The next few days will be crucial to determine XRP’s closing price at the end of the year and if there will indeed be a Santa Claus rally, as many expected.

With its most recent correction, XRP’s market cap has dropped once again to under $130 billion. This means that it has lost its third-place position to USDT, whose market capitalization is close to $140 billion.

TL;DR

• Internet Computer (ICP), Chainlink (LINK), and Hedera (HBAR) retained their top spots in terms of “notable development activity.”
• The rankings are based on filtered development events that reflect real progress, emphasizing active contributions from developers.

The Top 10 List

Cryptocurrency analytics platform Santiment recently estimated that Internet Computer (ICP) ranked first in terms of “notable development activity” in the past month, collecting a score of 409.63.

The asset started December on the right foot, with its price jumping to a multi-month high of over $15. However, the latest market correction negatively affected ICP, which plummeted below $10 (per CoinGecko’s data).

Chainlink (LINK) claimed the second spot with a ratio of 287.07, while Hedera (HBAR) ranked third. It is interesting to note that the top 3 club looked exactly the same after the previous research. 

Starknet (STRK) climbed the ladder and was positioned in fourth place, while Cardano (ADA) lost some steam and is now fifth. 

Similar to ICP and many other cryptocurrencies, ADA was at the forefront of gains in the first week of the month. On December 7, its price touched $1.30 (a level last observed at the start of 2022). The peak was short-lived, though, with ADA currently trading at around $0.84.

The other digital assets down the line include Optimism (OP), Polkadot (DOT), Kusama (KSM), DeFiChain (DFI), and sUSD (SUSD).

Santiment’s Methodology 

To conduct the aforementioned research, the platform’s team employs the so-called Ecosystem Dev Activity Dashboard, which shows the number of development events created on various blockchains and their associated dApps. 

“These events are carefully filtered and predefined to be representative of real programming progress, meaning no low-value actions are taken into consideration. This way, any crypto-curious person can easily see which are the most active crypto ecosystems out there,” the working group explained.

The team emphasized the importance of the size of a project’s community, particularly focusing on how many members are developers and actively contributing to the ecosystem.

Finally, Santiment clarified that development activity differs from GitHub activity. The former focuses on specific types of events, excluding things like commits, forks, comments, and project management tasks. In contrast, GitHub is comprised of all kinds of factors apart from commits.

“One key distinction between Dev Activity and GitHub Activity is that Dev Activity allows for a fairer comparison between different organizations. This is because some events excluded in Dev Activity are related to Issues and Issue Comments,” Santiment’s team concluded.