Ethereum and major altcoins take a dive as price remains volatile

ETH alongside a number of other cryptos — including Solana, Terra, Cardano, etc — have registered major losses over the past week.

• Ethereum’s 12-month gains currently stand at 50%.
• Solana’s has lost approximately 48% of its value since the start of 2022.
• Ukraine’s ETH, USDT and BTC donations currently stand at over AU $54 million (approx).

Ethereum, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by total capitalization, has continued to track the movements of the crypto market at large, dipping as low as AU $3,450 after having scaled up to a relative high of AU $3,600 over the last 24 hours. As a result of its ongoing price volatility, the altcoin is showcasing monthly losses of 15% while trading at a price point of AU $3,434.

These bearish movements have been spurred by a major meltdown witnessed by the global equities sector, with the market having been on the receiving end of a AU $3.92 trillion (US $2.9 tn) wipeout since the start of the month.

Ethrereum hasn’t been the only altcoin to be experiencing such a freefall, with recent investor favourite Solana (SOL) also recording a brutal year-to-date correction of over 48%, resulting in the total cap of the digital asset industry collectively slipping from AU $3.38tn (US $2.5tn) to AU $2.3 tn (US $1.7 tn) over the last sixty plus days.

Solana’s dismal performance can, in large part, be attributed to the network facing a total of six major outages between Q4 2021 and early 2022. Infact, the most recent incident which took place in January was linked to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, resulting in the platform’s dev team having to overhaul its native code structure in a big way.

Additionally, there have also been fears that Solana is becoming increasingly more centralised, with the cost of becoming a validator within the network increasing greatly in recent months — allowing only a select few individuals being able to acquire the recommended hardware (i.e. a 12 core 2.5+ GHz CPU, RAM memory equivalent to 256 GB, a high-speed 1 TB SSD drive, etc).

How to buy Ethereum

Ukraine’s crypto donations continue to increase

Since entering into a full blown territorial conflict with Russia a little over a week ago, Ukraine has continued to amass the sympathy of people across the globe. Infact, crypto donations sent directly to government-maintained wallets have been able to accumulate approx. AU $ 54 million (US $40 million).

Charities such as the Reserve fund of Ukraine (backed by prominent local crypto exchange Kuna) and Come Back Alive have been able to garner ETH, BTC, USDT donations worth AU $17.5 million (US $13 mln) and AU 9.72 million (US $7.2 mln) respectively.

eBay all set to enable crypto payments soon?

Jamie Iannone, CEO of eBay, revealed in a recent Q&A that his company may be on the verge of integrating crypto payments into its existing financial framework. Not only that, the firm is also looking at the possibility of creating its very own NFT trading ecosystem, however, no specific plans regarding the same were divulged.

According to Iannone, eBay has been closely studying the crypto market over the last few years so as to diversify its payment procurement methods. Infact, the company had tried integrating support for BTC payments as far back as 2014.

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Disclosure: The author owns a range of cryptocurrencies at the time of writing