Market Watch: Bitcoin Eyes $44K, NEAR Skyrockets 24%

After a few days of freefalls and touching a 2-week low, bitcoin has bounced off and is close to $44,000. The altcoins are also slightly in the green today, but NEAR Protocol has stolen the show with a massive double-digit surge.

Bitcoin Eyes $44K

CryptoPotato reported bitcoin’s recent price movements, which were primarily going south. The asset spiked above $47,000 on a few occasions up until April 5, before the bears took complete control over the market.

A day later, BTC found itself dipping below $45,000, and the situation worsened yesterday – April 7. This time, bitcoin dumped by another two grand to a daily bottom of $42,800. This became its lowest price point since March 24.

However, the cryptocurrency bounced off at that point and started to regain traction. As of now, it stands close to $44,000, which means that it has added around $1,000 in the past 24 hours.

Nevertheless, its market capitalization has slipped below $850 billion. It’s worth noting that the metric was above $900 billion until about a week ago.

NEAR Protocol Steals the Show

The altcoins also suffered in the past few days, but most are slightly in the green today. Ethereum dumped to around $3,200 just days after charting a three-month high above $3,500. As of now, a 2% daily increase has pushed the second-largest cryptocurrency to approximately $3,300.

Binance Coin, Solana, Ripple, Cardano, Polkadot, Dogecoin, and Shiba Inu have also produced minor daily increases. Avalanche is up by 4.5% after a $200 million token swap with Terra. Interestingly, the latter’s native cryptocurrency (LUNA) is down by a similar percentage on a 24-hour scale.

NEAR Protocol has seen the most impressive surge today, with a massive 24% jump. Consequently, NEAR is close to $20 and to its ATH of $20,44 (according to CoinGecko).

The crypto market cap is down by $150 billion in the past three days and now sits at just over $2 trillion.