Top cryptocurrency prices today: Avalanche, Terra, Solana, XRP drop up to 8%

New Delhi: The cryptocurrency market was trading in doldrums on Monday. Bitcoin and Ethereum dropped during early hours whereas altcoins fell sharply. The rising global turmoil due to war between Russia and Ukraine tied with economic uncertainty is spooking the markets. Rising inflation and interest hikes are other looming concerns for the digital market.

Barring the US-dollar pegged stablecoin, all other major crypto exchanges were trading with cuts during early hours. Avalanche tanked 8 per cent, whereas Solana, Cardano and XRP tanked 4 per cent each.

The global cryptocurrency market cap dwindled to $1.93 trillion mark, dropping as much as 3 per cent in the last 24 hours. However, total cryptocurrency trading volume increased more than 15 per cent to $63.92 billion.

What’s cooking in India?
The government is working on an FAQ on taxation of cryptocurrencies, which will give a nuanced clarification on the applicability of income tax and GST on virtual digital assets, an official said.

In other news, US-based crypto trading Coinbase has disabled the option to buy cryptocurrencies using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in India on Sunday. The world’s largest exchange, which announced its India entry through a big-bang event, had come under the National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI) scanner after it said it will allow users to purchase cryptocurrencies using UPI.

Expert’s take
Terra bought $230 million worth of Bitcoin on the 6th of April and it has just bought another $176 million worth of Bitcoin, said WazirX TradeDesk. “The buying streak is not going to stop any time soon as the CEO of Terraform Labs had mentioned in a series of tweets that they would like to build up a $3 billion Bitcoin reserve in the short term while the long term target is $10 billion,” it adds.

Global updates
A trio of former Citigroup Inc executives who left the bank last month have formed Motus Capital Management, a firm that wants to make it easier for HNIs to bet on cryptocurrencies.

Gas usage on Ethereum was up 13 per cent in March from the previous month amid greater demand for block space, reported CoinDesk citing DeFi analytics firm HashEx.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) firm Truflation is building a new gauge to track inflation independent from the government and in real-time, where officials can’t move the goalposts.

Tech View by Proassetz Exchange
Matic reached its pinnacle in the last week of December 2021 when a price of $2.876 was recorded on the daily timeframe. Since then it has lost nearly 50% of its value in the past three and half months. Trends have been downward with clear formation of lower tops, intermittently paused by dead cat rallies.

As of now, we identify two major resistance areas for Matic at $1.48 and $1.52 levels. There is a significant possibility that the March low of $1.34 levels could be revisited in near future and hence selling on rise with the above mentioned resistances as stop loss could be strategized for the coming week.

(Views and recommendations given in this section are the analysts’ own and do not represent those of ETMarkets.com. Please consult your financial adviser before taking any position in the asset/s mentioned.)