[Ripple (XRP) surges 8%, defying market sentiment, Bitcoin struggles at $66,000]
Bitcoin prices continued to struggle over the past day, falling to $65,300 for the first time since Friday amid uncertainty over the U.S. government.
Other cryptocurrencies are also down today, with the exception of XRP. XRP earlier surged to multi-month highs above $0.66.
The major cryptocurrency experienced significant volatility over the weekend, falling below $63,500 on Thursday but quickly rebounded to $67,000. A volatile weekend followed Donald Trump's appearance at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville, with prices swinging as much as $3,000 in a matter of hours on Saturday night.
Monday started higher, with Bitcoin rising to a seven-week high of $70,000. However, this rally was short-lived and bears quickly halted the upward momentum.
Bitcoin faced a violent rejection at this point, falling nearly $5,000 to hit a multi-day low of $65,300 (Bitstamp data). Despite a slight recovery, BTC is still experiencing daily losses and is currently trading at just over $66,000. Market capitalization fell below $1.310 trillion and market dominance fell to 52.3% (CG data).
Most of the big cryptocurrencies followed BTC down yesterday, and things are not too different today. ETH, BCH, and ADA are down slightly over the past 24 hours, while DOGE, TRX, AVAX, SHIB, LINK, DOT, and UNI are all down around 3%.
In contrast, Ripple's native token XRP defied overall market sentiment and earlier reached multi-month highs of over $0.66. KAS, XLM, and BNB have seen some gains since yesterday, but are also exceptions.