On Friday morning, BTC rose slightly. However, shortly after, it sank below the psychologically important level of $19,000 to $18,900, reaching last week's lows. At the time of writing the article, it was hovering at $18,975. The market capitalization of the asset is $364 billion with a daily trading volume of $24 billion.

After a decline to the lows of October 13, trading volumes amounted to $725,000 per hour. The total volume of liquidations reached $10 million

According to CoinMarketCap, the website for tracking the price of virtual assets, over the past 24 hours, BTC has lost 1%. The highest level was $19,315 and the lowest one came in at $19,004.

Crypto market

Ethereum, the main competitor of bitcoin, also started the trading session with an increase. After that, it lost momentum following a drop in BTC. At the time of writing the article, it approached $1,270. Overnight, it fell to $1,283. Its capitalization sank to $156.865 billion. Before that, ETH had been trading above $1,300 for a long time. Many crypto experts believe that $1,300 will serve as strong support.

If ether maintains its correction in the coming hours, the next support level may be located at $1,265. The nearest resistance level will be the psychologically important level of $1,300.

A steady rise in ether began at the end of August before the long-awaited event for all holders of the cryptocurrency.

On the morning of September 15, the Ethereum network made the transition from the Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm, which does not require mining. The transition occurred as part of a major update called The Merge.

In the first hours after the transition to the Proof-of-Stake algorithm, a strong influx of altcoins to centralized exchanges took place.

On the same day, the founder of the ETH network, Vitalik Buterin, confirmed the successful transition to PoS and the absence of failures or errors in the update. Earlier, he stated that the transition of the network to Proof-of-Stake would increase the popularity of digital assets for everyday payments thanks to reducing the commission to 2 cents. Buterin pointed out that the number of crypto payments fell after 2018 due to high transaction fees.

As for cryptocurrencies from the top 10 list by capitalization, Ripple dropped by 4.4%, Cardano sank by 2.81%, and Binance Coin lost 2.2%, logging the worst performance.

According to the results of last week, all coins, excluding Binance USD, were trading in the red zone. Cardano was the main outsider. It declined by 12.5%.

Yesterday, among the top 100 most capitalized digital assets, Toncoin was the biggest gainer. It climbed by 8.50%, while Ethereum Name Service saw the biggest drop of 7.26%, CoinGecko, the world's largest aggregator of data on virtual assets, reported.

This week, among the top hundred strongest digital assets, Casper gained the most, growing by 21.24%, while TerraClassicUSD plummeted by 27.29%.

At the time of writing the article, the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies stood at $943 billion, having decreased by 1.5% over the past day.

Since November last year, when this figure exceeded $3 trillion, the market cap has declined more than three times.