Crypto Scoop: Bitcoin continues bull run in 2021

New Year, New ATH’s!

We are off to a great start in 2021! BTC started the year on a high note of $29,111.52 USD, and has recently (Jan 7) skyrocketed past the $40K mark! 🤯

Bitcoin’s months of success have come after a dismal 3 years of running within a bear market. Much of the coins’ growth can be accredited to large name investors.

These institutions are moving assets to hedge against inflation caused by astronomical Federal Reserve expenditure during the ongoing pandemic. 

The cryptocurrency market has officially been valued at over $1 trillion - which for scale, is 1% of the entire global economy. This would mean that at least 1% of the world's money is now held in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Bitcoin is unsurprisingly the leader with a market cap of $674 billion, and Etherum not far behind holding a cap of $135 billion.

With the current trajectory and rate of growth within the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, the future for a more stable and inclusive global economy is looking very promising.

This statement is furthered by the fact that more and more people will continue to look for new ways of saving and preserving their money, and crypto is currently meeting the needs of many in that respect.  

DeFi gaining more grounds

As for other cryptocurrencies; Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has been replaced by Polkadot ($DOT) as the 6th largest crypto, with a market cap of $9.3 billion, following almost 6 months of inactivity.

“Polkadot is now the 2nd most active DeFi ecosystem, after Ethereum”, says the crypto’s co-founder. This is a super exciting time for project developers as the DOT ecosystem’s scalability and capability is promising to be a strong competitor to current leaders.

Ethereum was not left behind in the bull run and is taking strides to hit a new ATH, after reaching $1.2K USD on January 7th. Its previous ATH mark was around $1.4K USD (January 27th, 2018).

The future of Ripple (XRP) and Private Coins

Coinbase has made waves as of recent, by announcing it will suspend trading of XRP on January 19th, 2021 at 10 AM PST.

This comes after the recent lawsuit against Ripple Labs by the SEC (U.S Securities and Exchange Commission). XRP was the 3rd largest cryptocurrency up to now. 

Following a recent trend of exchanges delisting privacy coins, Bittrex has decided to follow suit. January 15th will be the last day on the exchange for Monero, Zcash and Dash. This trend is due to new regulations put in place to protect investors and eliminate the crime associated with privacy coins, due to their anonymity.