This Week in Coins: Bitcoin and Solana Jump, Rest of Crypto Market Rises

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.

Bitcoin and all other major coins and tokens have made gains over a seven-day period after what looked like was going to be a boring week.

BTC was sitting still on Monday but by Thursday it was surging. The price of Bitcoin is now comfortably over $47,000 per coin, according to CoinGecko. That’s a 11% rise over the week.

Experts spoke to Decrypt and said the surge was down to big investors who hoard lots of the cryptocurrency, picking up more of it this year, and tech-focused investors eyeing up the digital asset market.

Since the approval of 10 Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on January 10, the price of the biggest digital coin has dipped. This was down to a sell-off by Grayscale, but that appears to have eased now. As a result, money is flowing back into the asset.

The price of Ethereum (ETH) is also up significantly over seven days: it’s priced now at $2,498, a nearly 9% jump.

Developers finally set a date for the upgrade to the coin’s network—dubbed “Dencun”: March 13. It is hoped the upgrade will be the next step in upgrading the blockchain so it can handle far more transactions.

Other big news included Solana (SOL), the fifth biggest cryptocurrency by market cap. It suffered a network outage on Tuesday for the first time in a year, causing the price of SOL to dip. When the problem was solved, the price jumped again.

It’s now up and trading for $109, an 11% increase over the week.

And privacy coin Monero (XMR) took a heavy hit after crypto exchange Binance said Tuesday that it would delist the coin. It jumped the next day but is suffering after dropping nearly 28% over the week.

That makes it one of the week’s worst performers. Its current price stands at $119.