As a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies has fallen by $200 billion, or over 12 percent, in the last 24 hours.
According to CoinMarketCap, the total value of all cryptocurrencies is now around $1.56 trillion, down from a recent high of $1.77 trillion. Many of the biggest and most well-known cryptocurrencies in the business are also in the red. Bitcoin was trading at just over $35,400, down over 18% from the previous week and 9% from the previous day.
Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is currently trading at $2,370, down more than 12 percent from the day's high and more than 22 percent from the week's low.
Coins like Solana, Cardano, and XRP have all experienced double-digit drops in the previous 24 hours, losing 10 percent ; 17 percent ; and 13 percent respectively.
Crash of the market as a whole
In the wake of Russia's military campaign against Ukraine, the crypto market has fallen along with the rest of the financial sector.
As the Russian economy struggles under the weight of international sanctions, the value of Russian stocks has plummeted by more than $250 billion.
The Russian central bank, the Bank of Russia, has decided to engage in the foreign exchange market in order to help stabilize the Russian economy after the ruble plunged to lows not seen since 2016.
The Bank of Russia will lend $11.5 billion to the country's banks as part of a broader effort to provide liquidity.
Even Russia's major ruble-denominated stock market index, the MOEX Russia Index, has lost half of its value since its record high in October.
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 have both fallen 1.8% and 2.6%, respectively, on the global markets.
Gold touched a high of $1,942 per ounce early this morning, indicating that investors are flocking to history's most reliable safe haven.
This reflects a nearly 2% increase over the previous day, and a level not seen since the end of 2020.
Trading volumes increased by 4,34,773.31 percent, to $152.06 billion, within the last 24 hours, as the global cryptocurrency market capitalization increased by 2.45 percent.
Decentralised finance (DeFi) transactions totalled $22.34 billion in the last day, or 14.69 percent of the overall 24-hour volume of cryptocurrency trade. Stablecoins had a total volume of $129.63 billion, or around 85.25 percent of the total.
On the morning of February 25, Bitcoin's market share increased by 0.68 percent to 42.44 percent, and the currency was trading at $38,550.47.
At the time of writing, both Bitcoin and Ethereum saw their value rise in rupee terms by 3.72 percent and 1.54 percent, respectively.
Both Avalanche and Cardano were up 2.96 percent and 0.28 percent, respectively, at Rs 6,040 and Rs 6,679. It's been a rough 24 hours for Polkadot as it dropped 0.16 percent to Rs 1,272.1 and Litecoin dropped 2.36 percent to Rs 8,201.52. A 0.47 percent decline brought Tether's price to Rs 78.63.
Memecoin SHIB lost 2.7 percent, while Dogecoin dropped 3.08 percent to Rs 9.74 per coin. Terra (LUNA) climbed 9.77 percent to Rs 5,120.2 per share.
The United States, Kazakhstan, and Russia make up the bulk of the Bitcoin network's computational power. Now that Russia is preparing for war with Ukraine, some in the cryptocurrency sector are keeping a close eye on the network to see if anything goes wrong.
Sanctions could change the calculus for Russian Bitcoin miners—who often swap BTC for cash with exchanges and other businesses tied to the old banking system. For the time being, mining in Russia is relatively stable.
In July 2021, Russia accounted for more than 11 percent of the worldwide Bitcoin hashrate, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. In order to earn new Bitcoin, "miners" use specialized hardware and software to increase their "hashrate," which is a measure of the network's computational power.
With a monthly active user base of 11.4 million, Coinbase surprised analysts by reporting a profit of nearly $2.5 billion in the most recent quarter. Coinbase's revenue was above the $1.97 billion consensus expectation for the first time, while the number of users reached a record high, reversing a recent slide that saw the company's user base fall to 7.4 million in the third quarter.
Coinbase made $840 million in earnings in the second quarter of this year, which is more than quadruple the profit it achieved in the first three months of this year.
"The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a crime against the Russian and Ukrainian people," Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote in his native Russian on Wednesday.
"Very unhappy by Putin's choice to reject the chance of a diplomatic solution to the conflict with Ukraine and go to war instead," wrote Buterin in a blog post on the matter.
Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Russia would launch a "special military operation" in Ukraine, a poorly veiled reference to a complete invasion, after recognizing the independence of two rebel areas in eastern Ukraine earlier this week.
Diplomacy has been attempted by the younger Buterin. He had a meeting with Putin in 2017 in an attempt to encourage Russia to use the Ethereum platform. Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed interest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Russia's central bank recently overruled him when they said that the country's energy resources gave it "some competitive advantages" in Bitcoin mining, which he later denied. Russia could use Bitcoin mining in former Soviet states to attempt an "end run around US sanctions," according to an article published in Wired in 2019.
Cryptocurrency's ethos tends to go opposed to authoritarianism, but neither Putin nor Russia has fully embraced it. Nonpartisan and decentralized by design, distributed blockchains are run by thousands of people throughout the world. Despite this, they are still the work of people who hold political views.
