These Are This Week’s Top Performers as Bitcoin Price Defends $43K (Market Watch)

Bitcoin dropped on Christmas Eve by roughly a grand and briefly went below $43,000 but has managed to bounce off above that level as of now.

Polkadot is the top performer from the larger-cap alts now, with a 5% increase on a daily scale. In contrast, SOL and AVAX have cooled off after the recent rallies.

BTC Down to $43K

After the unfavorable start of the previous business week, bitcoin went on the offensive on Wednesday and Friday and spiked above $44,000 during both trading days. However, the bears were quick to intercept the moves and didn’t allow any further increases.

Moreover, BTC couldn’t even maintain its position above the $44,000 line and was pushed back down a bit. In fact, the following few days were quite sluggish, as the cryptocurrency remained in a tight range between $43,000 and $44,000.

Sunday evening, though, brought some pain for the bulls. BTC slipped by nearly a grand and dipped to $42,700 (on Bitstamp). Nevertheless, it reacted relatively well to this decline and recovered a big portion of the losses. As a result, bitcoin now trades inches above $43,000.

Its market capitalization, though, is down to $843 billion, while its dominance over the altcoins has dropped to under 51% on CMC.

This Week’s Top Performers

Most larger-cap alts have retraced slightly on a daily scale, including minor declines from ETH, SOL, BNB, ADA, AVAX, DOGE, and LINK. In contrast, Polkadot stands strong with a 5% surge that has pushed DOT to over $9.

The weekly scale is quite different, though. Near Protocol and Mina lead the charge with massive 80% surges.

Optimism and Sei follow suit with 70% increases, while SOL is up by 60% within the same timeframe. In fact, Solana’s native token has become the fourth-largest digital asset, with a market cap of almost $50 billion.

The total crypto market cap has added almost $100 billion over the past week and is currently well above $1.650 trillion on CMC.