Bitcoin Briefly Hits $22,000 Before Dropping Off While Ether Begins 'Merge' Week on a Slump

Bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, rose as much as 3.3 percent at one point on early Monday, briefly scaling $22,000 (roughly Rs. 17.5 lakh) before falling back yet again. As things stand, the value of Bitcoin has witnessed a rise of over 0.5 percent in the last 24 hours with its price now hovering around the $21,700 (roughly Rs. 17.3 lakh) mark across global exchanges, while Indian exchanges like CoinSwitch and CoinDCX value BTC at $22,572 (roughly Rs. 17.98 lakh), 0.72 percent higher than that on Sunday morning.

On global exchanges like CoinMarketCap, Coinbase, and Binance, the price of Bitcoin stands at $21,708 (roughly Rs. 17.3 lakh) while CoinGecko data shows that BTC's value is currently 8.8 percent higher than where it stood last Friday.

Heading into 'Merge' week, Ether has continued its upward trajectory over the weekend although come early Monday, the price has seen a bit of a dip. As things stand, Ether is valued at $1,826 (roughly Rs. 1.45 lakh) across Indian exchanges while values on global exchanges see the crypto's value at $1,728 (roughly Rs. 1.37 lakh), where the cryptocurrency's value has slipped up by 2.05 percent over the past 24 hours.

Ether's showing over the weekend sees the cryptocurrency's value remain a lot higher than where it was last week, [CoinGecko data] (https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ethereum) suggests that the world's second-largest crypto asset has moved up 10 percent in value week-on-week.

Gadgets 360's cryptocurrency price tracker reveals that most major altcoins have had a mixed showing to begin the week. The global crypto market capitalisation also witnessed a rise of 0.53 percent through late Thursday and early Friday.

Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, Cardano, Polygon, TRON, and BNB all saw minor losses over the last 24 hours. Meanwhile, Uniswap, Monero, Avalanche, and Chainlink saw minor gains.

Memecoins Shiba Inu and Dogecoin also followed most altcoins with minor ups to show for. Dogecoin is currently valued at $0.06 (roughly Rs. 5.4) after losing 1.37 percent in value over the last 24 hours, while, Shiba Inu is valued at $0.000013 (roughly Rs. 0.001035), up 1.69 percent over the past day.

"The crypto market cap is at $1.09 trillion (roughly Rs. 1,09,000 crore) with Bitcoin gaining traction and touching $22,000 (roughly Rs. 17.5 lakh) by surpassing resistance of the prices held last 2 weeks ago. With the Ethereum merge expected around September 13-15, ETH gained significantly and returned 9.4 percent over the last week. DeFi is leading the sectoral returns with weekly growth of 15 percent due to a higher utilisation rate in lending and borrowing platforms, as more and more users continue to borrow Ethereum in anticipation of potential ETH 2.0 airdrops," the research team at CoinDCX tells Gadgets 360.

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