Bitcoin Turns Red While Ether Continues to Surge as PoS Transition Looks Imminent for the Network

After a strong showing over the past few days, the lasting bullishness in the global crypto market has finally come to an end, and the result is a bearish trend beginning to form come Friday morning. Thursday happened to go down as a strong day of trade for the world's most popular cryptocurrency after a 2.45 percent surge in value, however, Bitcoin price is currently in the red by 0.18 percent. Bitcoin's value currently stands at $42,044 (roughly Rs. 32 lakh) on Indian exchange CoinSwitch Kuber.

On global exchanges, the price of Bitcoin has moved up beyond the $40,000 (roughly Rs. 30 lakh) mark at $40,490 (roughly Rs. 31 lakh) slipping by 1.28 percent over the past 24 hours. As per CoinGecko data, Bitcoin has had a fairly good week, up by 2.8 percent week-on-week.

Ether has had an even better week so far. At the time of publishing, Ether is valued at $2,882 (roughly Rs. 2 lakh) on CoinSwitch Kuber while values on global exchanges see the crypto's value at $2,777 (roughly Rs. 2 lakh), where the coin has seen a fairly positive 24 hour run gaining 0.83 percent over the past 24 hours. Ethereum developers have successfully merged the blockchain's execution and consensus layers on the Kiln testnet. The achievement has market participants already anticipating the positive effects that the mainnet transition to Proof-of-Stake will have on the price of Ether.

CoinGecko data reveals that the cryptocurrency's value has moved up by 6.5 percent over the past week although the original altcoin has dropped by roughly 12.5 percent in value over the past month.

Gadgets 360's cryptocurrency price tracker paints a fairly mixed picture — the global crypto market cap falling by 0.36 percent over the past 24 hours. While Terra, Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, and Polygon all marked losses, while, Avalanche, Stellar, Uniswap, and Binance Coin have all moved up value.

Meme coins Shiba Inu and Dogecoin have wiped gains made through Thursday for another week in the red. Dogecoin is currently valued at $0.12 (roughly Rs. 9) after dipping by 1.78 percent over the last 24 hours, while, Shiba Inu is valued at $0.000023 (roughly Rs. 0.0017), down by 2.31 percent over the past day.

The current reduction in the market value shows the possibility of a further decrease in the value. The recent bullish rally resembled the one back in the starting days of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, which brought speedy gains and later led to an even speedier correction.

Galaxy Digital CEO, Mike Novogratz is bullish on BTC's long-term growth predicting that Bitcoin will likely hit the $500,000 (roughly Rs. 4 crore) mark in terms of value in five years. Novogratz admits that he will be wrong on the adoption cycle if the flagship coin fails to reach the above-mentioned price milestone. He claims that Bitcoin grew much faster last year compared to the internet in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, the European Union's securities, banking, and insurance watchdogs believe that consumers risk losing all their money invested in crypto-assets and could fall prey to scams very easily. "Consumers face the very real possibility of losing all their invested money if they buy these assets," the three EU authorities said in a statement.

It marks a flurry of direct warnings to consumers about crypto assets by EU authorities, spelling out that consumers have no protections or recourse to compensation under existing EU financial services law.

Regulators are increasingly worried that more consumers are buying 17,000 different crypto-assets, including Bitcoin and Ether, which account for 60 percent of the market, without being fully aware of the risks, the regulators said.

Cryptocurrency is an unregulated digital currency, not a legal tender and subject to market risks. The information provided in the article is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, trading advice or any other advice or recommendation of any sort offered or endorsed by NDTV. NDTV shall not be responsible for any loss arising from any investment based on any perceived recommendation, forecast or any other information contained in the article.