Bitcoin, Ether Continue to Rise After Massive Surge Through Friday

Bitcoin has been on a bit of a recovery run over the past 10 days and if the weekend's figures are anything to go by, the price rally appears to be far from over as the crypto asset makes a break above the $42,000 (roughly Rs. 31.5 lakh) mark. The world's most valuable cryptocurrency had a strong 10 percent surge in price through Friday, with BTC bulls pushing for $45,000 (roughly Rs. 34 lakh) as the next target across global exchanges. Bitcoin's value currently stands at $45,087 (roughly Rs. 33.5 lakh), up by 3.88 percent over the past 24 hours on Indian exchange CoinSwitch Kuber.

Meanwhile, on global exchanges, the price of the most popular cryptocurrency stood at $42,714 (roughly Rs. 32 lakh) up by 3.36 percent over the past 24 hours. As per CoinGecko data, Bitcoin's value has surged close to 13 percent over the past week, after a dismal showing through January.

Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, has had an even better showing since the start of February and that run hasn't seemingly run out of steam yet. At the time of publishing, Ether is valued at $3,238 (roughly Rs. 2.5 lakh) on CoinSwitch Kuber while values on global exchanges see the crypto's value hover around the $3,000 (roughly Rs. 2 lakh) mark at $3,078 (roughly Rs. 2.5 lakh), where the coin rose by 2.88 percent over the past 24 hours. Compared to the price of Ether a week ago, CoinGecko data reveals that the cryptocurrency's value has surged by 18.2 percent, buoyed by 13 percent rise through Friday.

Gadgets 360's cryptocurrency price tracker reveals that most of the popular altcoins have also had a strong start to the week. Cardano, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, Terra, Binance Coin, Cosmos, Polkadot, and Chainlink all managed to increase in value, with play-to-earn tokens like Decentraland leading the charge.

Meme coins haven't had a very good start to the year, but February appears to have flicked a switch for both SHIB and DOGE — the two most sought-after meme coins amongst others as both crypto assets have managed a decent showing over the past week. Dogecoin is currently valued at $0.16 (roughly Rs. 12) after rising 7.79 percent over the last 24 hours, while, Shiba Inu is valued at $0.000029 (roughly Rs. 0.002), up by a massive 24.39 percent over the past 24 hours.

While the crypto market has seen a big jump in market capitalisation over the past week, Yuga Labs, the team behind Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), is rumoured to be in talks with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, for a possible investment in an upcoming founding round.

Digital collectibles from BAYC, a collection of 10,000 algorithmically generated unique animated images, have been snapped up by the likes of celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow and Jimmy Fallon, with Justin Bieber forking out ETH 500 ($965,000 or roughly Rs. 7 crore) for one of the prized non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Meanwhile, Dogecoin is readying to make a big transition too. Gaining intense criticism for consuming too much energy and being bad for the environment, the Proof of Work (PoW) blockchain consensus mechanism has lost favour among crypto projects. In the spirit of change, Dogecoin is the latest cryptocurrency planning to transition to the more efficient Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism with a bit of help from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

The Dogecoin Foundation — a non-profit that aims to support the development of the meme coin — has announced that Dogecoin's model of a Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain promises increased involvement of its community and DOGE holders in the governance and management of the Dogecoin network.

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