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This Week’s Summary

• The cryptocurrency market looks to end the week at a total market capitalization of $2,238 trillion.
• Bitcoin (BITCOMP) is down by almost 6% and trading just above $47,000.
• Ethereum (ETH-X) is down by roughly 7% after a disappointing week.
• XRP (XRP-X) dropped by almost 8% over the past seven days.
• Most altcoins are trading in the red, with very few exceptions.
• The DeFi sector lost nearly $2 billion from the Total Value Locked in protocols, which now stands at $99.82 billion.

Cryptocurrency Trends for the Week of Dec. 27, 2021 – Jan. 2, 2022: Market Analysis and Performance

The crypto market enters 2022 on a slightly disappointing note. While it ended 2021 on an upwards curve, the first days of the New Year have seen it plummet again. Even the market capitalization dropped by nearly $110 billion in the past week. As a result, it lost most of the value it had gained before Christmas.

Bitcoin has been recently trading at around $47,100. However, its most recent slump is yesteryear’s news. The king coin broke past the $50,000 barrier only a week ago. However, after failing to climb the $52 thousand threshold on Monday, it came tumbling down to its recent value.

Ethereum lost the $4,000 level last week and has failed to regain it ever since. Furthermore, the second crypto in command continued to bleed down to its recent price of roughly $3,750. Now, crypto market investors can only hope that this trend will end before ETH loses too much of its 2021 spoils.

Altcoins & DeFi

Ripple’s XRP is again on a downward spiral. After failing to climb above the $1 level last week, the coin has been bleeding heavily. At the time of writing, it was trading at around $0.84. Most importantly, its situation doesn’t look too rosy for the weeks ahead.

Elsewhere, most altcoins are trading in the red. Even LUNA, one of December’s top climbers, has been registering a 10% value drop. Meanwhile, Cardano (ADA-X) has been down by almost 5% and Solana (SOL-X) by 12%. Lastly, Shiba Inu (SHIB-X) dropped by 11%, and Dogecoin (DOGE-X) lost 8% of its value.

The small group of altcoins that have been trading in the green include Algorand (ALGO-X) (up by 3%) and Uniswap (UNI-X) (up by nearly 2%). Additionally, we can count Cosmos (ATOM-X) with a 12% increase and Fantom with a 10% value boost.

The Metaverse sector is experiencing a colossal bloodbath with significant losses across the board. For instance, Decentraland (MANA-X) has been down by nearly 11%, just like Axie Infinity and Sandbox (SAND-X). As it stands, this slice of the crypto market is not doing as well as many have expected. The DeFi sector lost nearly $2 billion to the total value protocols (TVL), which now stands at almost $99.82 billion.

What’s in the News?

• NFT Games generated $2.3 billion in revenue only in Q3 of 2021.
• Here’s why Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder, is a Bitcoin Maximalist.

Next Week’s Market Forecast

This is not the start to the New Year that we expected. However, most expert traders are used to these seesawing movements that characterize early January in the crypto market. Like last year showed us, a slow start doesn’t necessarily bring bad news. On the contrary, we can look forward to significant improvements as the year unfolds.