After Bitcoin (BTC) faced its third consecutive rejection, investors became more confident in adding altcoin positions. For the leading cryptocurrency, the path to $50,000 appears more challenging than previously expected.
According to Euronews Next, on March 14, the European Union rejected a proposed rule that could have banned the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) mining algorithm used by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Several EU parliamentarians have been pushing to ban PoW mining over energy concerns.
BTC/USD price at FTX. Source: TradingView
In terms of performance, the aggregate market capitalization of all cryptos was relatively flat over the past seven days, registering a modest 0.4% gain to $1.77 trillion. However, the apparent lack of performance in the overall market does not represent some mid-capitalization altcoins, which managed to gain 17% or more in one week.
Bitcoin presented a 2.5% gain over the previous seven days, while the vice-leader Ether (ETH) increased 3.6%. However, they were no match for the altcoin rally that happened. Below are the top gainers and losers among the 80 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
Weekly winners and losers among the top-80 coins. Source: Nomics
THORChain (RUNE) rallied after enabling synthetic tokens on March 10. Those derivatives are pegged to the value of other underlying collateralized assets. In THORChain’s version, the project has opted to back its synths with 50% of the underlying asset and 50% in RUNE.
Privacy tokens ZCash (ZEC) and Monero (XMR) rallied as United States President Joe Biden signed an executive order on March 9 focused on establishing a regulatory framework for crypto — mentioning its possible role in circumventing sanctions.
Lastly, Terra (LUNA) rallied after Terraform Labs donated $1.1 billion to Luna Foundation Guard’s (LFG) reserves on March 11. LFG was launched in January as part of a broader effort to grow the Terra ecosystem and improve the sustainability of the network’s stablecoins.
On the other hand, Fantom (FTM) led the worst performers after prominent Fantom Foundation team members Andre Cronje and Anton…
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