Markets: Bitcoin, Ether fall; Solana show steep loss

Bitcoin and Ether fell on Thursday morning in Asia, along with most top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Solana lost 11% of its value, the steepest drop on that list, followed by Cardano and Polkadot.

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Fast facts

• Bitcoin lost 0.98% to US$16,552.32 in the 24 hours to 8 a.m. in Hong Kong, with Ether falling 1.87% to trade at US$1,190, according to CoinMarketCap data.
• Bitcoin price has staggered below the US$17,000 mark for most of December, still reeling from the ongoing FTX.com bankruptcy proceedings and expectations of more interest rate hikes to come.
• The global cryptocurrency market capitalization was down 1.55% to US$794.72 billion, while the total crypto trading volume grew by 11.59% to US$30.79 billion.
• Solana lost 11.96% to US$9.76, part of a 19.5% drop over the past seven days. Earlier this week, two major non-fungible token (NFT) collections in its ecosystem, DeGods and Y00ts, announced that they will be migrating to Ethereum and Polygon in the coming year.
• Solana has also been affected FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s fall from grace, as he was a prominent and outspoken supporter of the blockchain. Compared to the start of 2022, Solana has lost nearly 95% of its value, now out of the top 10 cryptocurrencies list.
• Cardano fell 4.58% to US$0.2485, Polkadot lost 4.35% to trade at US$4.29, and Dogecoin slipped 4.5% to US$0.07. Other top 10 cryptocurrencies were also in the loss column except for TRON, which was up 0.09%.
• Kraken, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, announced Wednesday that it will no longer continue operations in Japan, blaming the currently weak crypto market globally.
• U.S. equities finished lower on Wednesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 1.1%, the S&P 500 Index closed down 1.2%, and the Nasdaq Composite Index fell 1.35%.

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