Cryptocurrency prices today surge; Bitcoin above $38,000, Shiba Inu, Terra gain over 5%

In cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin price today was trading above the $38,000 mark. The world's largest and most popular cryptocurrency rose more than 2% to $38,612. The global crypto market’s value today gained over 2% in the past 24 hours to $1.83 trillion, according to pricing from CoinGecko.

Bitcoin has been struggling along with risk assets in recent months. It’s largely traded in a range of $35,000 to $45,000 this year as the Federal Reserve started hiking interest rates amid stubbornly high inflation. The digital token down 17% in year-to-date (YTD) terms, and more than 40% far away from its record high of near $69,000 it had hit in November 2021.

On the other hand, Ether, the coin linked to the ethereum blockchain and the second largest cryptocurrency, also gained nearly 3% to $2,841. Meanwhile, dogecoin price today was trading more than 2% higher at $0.13 whereas Shiba Inu surged over 5% to $0.000021.

Other digital tokens' performance also improved as Solana, Stellar, Polkadot, Cardano, Uniswap, Terra, XRP, Avalanche, Polygon Litecoin, Tron were trading with gains in the range of 3-6% over the last 24 hours.

The Solana blockchain suffered a seven-hour outage, caused by a significant rush of bots trying to mint nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on the crypto network. 

An NFT minting program for Solana called Candy Machine struggled under a tsunami of traffic from bots seeking to push through transactions late Saturday, which caused Solana’s mainnet to fall out of consensus and crash as nodes belonging to validators collapsed under the weight, reported Bloomberg.

(With inputs from agencies)