Lagatar24 Desk
Mumbai, Nov.16: Bitcoin fell below the $63,000 level today as cryptocurrency values plummeted. By market capitalization, the world’s most popular and largest cryptocurrency fell almost 6% to $62,054. Bitcoin, which recently set a new high of about $69,000, has gained over 114 % year-to-date (YTD).
Ether, the second largest cryptocurrency and the unit tied to the Ethereum blockchain, fell more than 6% to $4,400. Ether has been hovering around an all-time high, catching up with bitcoin’s rise and riding the wave of news about broader blockchain deployment.
According to CoinDesk, the price of Dogecoin has dropped over 4% to $0.25, while the price of Shiba Inu has dropped over 2% to $0.000051. Other cryptocurrencies, such as Litecoin, XRP, Polkadot, Uniswap, Stellar, Cardano, and Solana, have all seen price drops in the recent 24 hours.
Meanwhile, on Sunday, Bitcoin received a big upgrade that allows its blockchain to process more complicated transactions, potentially expanding the virtual currency’s use cases and making it more competitive with Ethereum in terms of smart contract processing.
The Taproot upgrade is the most major change to the bitcoin protocol since the 2017 SegWit (Segregated Witness) block capacity change. By extracting data on signatures from bitcoin transactions, SegWit effectively boosted the number of transactions that could fit inside a block.
Bitcoin’s journey has been bumpy, with the most popular digital token falling below $30,000 in June amid criticism of its energy use and China’s cryptocurrency crackdown. Partially as the crypto sector reacted to China’s broadsides, it began to recover.
