Bitcoin, Ether Price Surge Hits a Blip as Bears Fight Back

Bitcoin has been on steady bull run since February 4 but there does appear to be a price ceiling for now, as after reaching a weekly high of $45,500 (roughly Rs. 35 lakh) early on February 8, bears were able to lower the price of Bitcoin further down, around $43,500 (roughly Rs. 32.5 lakh). Over the last 24 hours, the world's most valuable cryptocurrency has had a 1.5 percent dip in price after a 2.03 percent dip through Tuesday. Bitcoin's value currently stands at $46,170 (roughly Rs. 35 lakh) on Indian exchange CoinSwitch Kuber.

Meanwhile, on global exchanges, the price of BTC stood at $43,429 (roughly Rs. 32.5 lakh), down by 1.35 percent over the past 24 hours. As per CoinGecko data, Bitcoin's value has surged by more than 12 percent over the past week and an 18 percent rise over the past fortnight.

Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, has followed Bitcoin's suit and had a price correction of its own after soaring past $3,000 (roughly Rs. 2 lakh) on global exchanges. At the time of publishing, Ether is valued at $3,266 (roughly Rs. 2.5 lakh) on CoinSwitch Kuber while values on global exchanges see the crypto's value at $3,081 (roughly Rs. 2.5 lakh) after a 2.36 percent dip 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 close to 11 percent.

Gadgets 360's cryptocurrency price tracker reveals that most of the popular altcoins also saw a dent in the wider bull run. Cardano, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, Terra, Binance Coin, Cosmos, Polkadot, and Chainlink all witnessed a drop-off in value, while Uniswap topped the list of losers on the day with a 8 percent dip in value over the past 24 hours.

Meme coins haven't had a very good start to the year, but February appears to have changed fortunes for both SHIB and DOGE — the two most sought-after meme coins. Dogecoin is currently valued at $0.16 (roughly Rs. 12) after losing 5.4 percent in value over the last 24 hours, while, Shiba Inu is valued at $0.000033 (roughly Rs. 0.0025), down by close to 9 percent over the past 24 hours. That said, both dog coins still stand a fair way into the green if you look at weekly price metrics.

Bitcoin bulls have successfully returned the main digital currency's price to the $44,000 (roughly Rs. 33 lakh) support level, boosted by encouraging occurrences. Most notably, the Canadian subsidiary of accounting major KPMG recently announced that it has integrated BTC and ETH to its corporate treasury. In addition, Tesla reported in a recently filed 10-K that it possessed nearly $2 billion (roughly Rs. 14,950 crore) in BTC at the end of last year.

Meanwhile, India-based Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development platform Polygon made headlines on Tuesday after raising a massive $450 million (roughly Rs. 3,364 crore) in its first major financing round led by Sequoia Capital India, Tiger Global, SoftBank, and more than 40 other venture capital funds and prominent investors like the co-founder of alternative investment management platform Brevan Howard, Alan Howard, and crypto evangelist Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank. Polygon claims that the money will allow the team to help scale Ethereum and accelerate the mass adoption of Web3 applications.

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