$Litecoin was trading at $113.876 by 17:56 (22:56 GMT) on the Investing.com Index on Wednesday, up 11.09% on the day. It was the largest one-day percentage gain since January 15.
The move upwards pushed Litecoin's market cap up to $8.000B, or 0.23% of the total cryptocurrency market cap. At its highest, Litecoin's market cap was $25.609B.
Litecoin had traded in a range of $100.783 to $113.876 in the previous twenty-four hours.
Over the past seven days, Litecoin has seen a rise in value, as it gained 4.13%. The volume of Litecoin traded in the twenty-four hours to time of writing was $747.723M or 0.50% of the total volume of all cryptocurrencies. It has traded in a range of $93.2916 to $113.8759 in the past 7 days.
At its current price, Litecoin is still down 72.89% from its all-time high of $420.00 set on December 12, 2017.
Elsewhere in cryptocurrency trading Bitcoin was last at $99,730.0 on the Investing.com Index, up 3.11% on the day.
Ethereum was trading at $3,430.45 on the Investing.com Index, a gain of 6.00%.
Bitcoin's market cap was last at $1,975.417B or 56.41% of the total cryptocurrency market cap, while Ethereum's market cap totaled $412.720B or 11.78% of the total cryptocurrency market value.
$BTC Texas state Senator Charles Schwertner has introduced Senate Bill (SB 778) to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve in Texas. If passed, Texas would be the first state to have such a reserve, positioning it at the forefront of the digital economy. The bill aims to create a special fund for the state to own and hold Bitcoin (BTC) as a financial asset and accept Bitcoin donations from the public. It recognizes Bitcoin's potential to enhance financial resilience and serve as a hedge against inflation and economic volatility. The bill also proposes secure storage and management systems, including cold storage and regular audits for transparency and security. The funding for Bitcoin purchases would be limited to 1% of general revenue.
This is not the first attempt to establish a Bitcoin reserve in Texas. In December, Texas Representative Giovanni Capriglione proposed a similar bill (HB 1598) through the House. Other states like Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, and New Hampshire have also introduced similar bills recently.
XRP exhibited remarkable dynamics, achieving a 3.5% increase within just one minute..
The United States reported a higher-than-expected Consumer Price Index (CPI) for December, showing a monthly increase of 0.4% after seasonal adjustment, surpassing the forecast of 0.3%. The annual CPI rate climbed to 2.9%, the highest since July 2023, marking its third consecutive monthly rise.
The markets, both traditional and cryptocurrency, embraced the news with positivity, and what a move it was, as the price of Bitcoin literally shot up by over 2% in a matter of minutes.
Other popular cryptocurrencies, such as XRP, showed even crazier dynamics, with a 3.5% gain in just one minute. We are talking about a multi-billion dollar asset, and such a rapid change in price is worth not just millions, but billions of dollars, making it analogous to an earthquake.
For a particular category of investors, known as sellers or bears, this was indeed somewhat accurate.
Bears crushed: What's next? As became known thanks to data from CoinGlass, the amount of short positions liquidated since the CPI release totaled $87.23 million, which is three times more than the amount of long positions. In total, the liquidation of short positions amounted to $250 million, or an enormous quarter of a billion dollars, in just 24 hours. What is 63% of that? Shorts, and most of them were liquidated after the CPI.
Among the top bear annihilators are traditionally Bitcoin and Ethereum, and this time XRP also made it to the top. As the third largest cryptocurrency, XRP jumped as high as $2.90, liquidating over $14 million in shorts alone. To put that in perspective, Bitcoin made $39 million and Ethereum made $28 million.
Where the market goes from here, remains to be seen. All the major news of January, at least on the monetary policy side, has happened. Upcoming is the resignation of Gary Gensler, the current SEC chairman, in five days, and a change in the U.S. administration. These developments could introduce new dynamics for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP, leaving investors speculating on whether bullish or bearish trends will dominate in the coming weeks.
Vitalik Buterin Says Sony's Controversial L2 Shows Why Ethereum Is Great for Business Sony's Ethereum scaling network Soneium faced pushback from some users soon after launch, but Vitalik Buterin sees nuance in the noise.
By Andrés Mariani.
$ETH $Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin weighed in Wednesday on the controversy surrounding Soneium, a Sony-launched Ethereum layer-2 scaling network that left some meme coin traders in the lurch this week while trying to suppress certain transactions.
“Businesses can make very fine-grained choices around how much control they keep vs. give to users,” Buterin wrote in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter). “But whatever rules they choose, that's what the rules are.”
Not long after Soneium officially launched, some users griped within Soneium’s Discord that they were unable to transact in two nascent meme coins called Aibo and Toro, per DL News.
The @Soneium situation is a good live demonstration of how launching an ethereum L2 is great for businesses *and* users.
Businesses can make very fine-grained choices around how much control they keep vs give to users.
But whatever rules they choose, that's what the rules are.…https://t.co/jmaCRDsyF0