The crypto market looks set to end a volatile week with a welcome recovery, adding close to 5% in early Friday trade.
At US$952bn, the markets are now only 1% lower against the week.
Ethereum’s savage downside saw a 6% reversal that brought it back up to US$1,350 after skirting dangerously close to one thousand, though is still nearly 9% down on the week.
Bitcoin, which has shown slightly more stability, is trading at US$19,400 after adding over 3% this morning.
The real big hitter has been Ripple’s XRP token, which has rallied over 60% this week; nearly half of those gains happen in the past day alone. The payment token is now at four-month highs, buoyed mainly by potentially good news coming out of its long-running legal spat with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Other top movers this week include the Stellar network’s XLM token, which saw its market cap shoot up to US$3.3bn on a 27% rally, and Algorand (ALGO), which added over 30% to its now US$2.7bn market cap.
Cronos (CRO), the native coin of the Crypto.com exchange, saw some relief after being absolutely decimated this year - a 13% weekly gain brought its market cap abvoe US$3bn.
After a valiant effort by the short squeezers, Terra Classic (LUNC) ultimately ended the week in a worse position, with the bears managing to depress the community-run project by nearly 6%.
But the two biggest losers this week were the two post-Merge Ethereum alternatives – Ravencoin and Ethereum Classic – which fell 25% and 15% respectively.
In the decentralised finance (DeFi) space, Curve’s recent sluggish performance saw a bit of a reversal today, with 5% added to its market cap, while Compound Finance and MakerDAO are also performing well.
Total value locked across all DeFi platforms shot up 5.5% to US$55.5bn in the past day, thus bringing TVL to a net positive position against the week.