Bitcoin Reverses Rally Amidst Mining Ban With NEAR and LUNA Surging

Last week happenings in the cryptocurrency markets kept a lot of investors at the edges of their seats. With the news cycle being dominated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, crypto market giant Bitcoin has suffered immensely from the raging conflict.

Monday, 28 February, the last day of the month, saw Bitcoin trading at a disappointing $37,500. However, barely two days later, the midweek rally drove the price of the largest digital currency in the world by 20 percent, but just before this uptrend, Bitcoin tumbled even deeper to a catastrophic $34,670. 

Generally, the situation surrounding Bitcoin’s rapid gains and losses mostly leveled out with it finishing the week with a 0.78% increase in market value. Sadly, Ethereum didn’t fare as well as Bitcoin. The second largest cryptocurrency fell by 4.3% in the last couple of days to now trade at $2,670.

Realistically, despite the bearish cloud hovering around the cryptocurrency markets – the severe drop of crypto market capitalization by a heavy $68 billion – most of the leading cryptocurrencies hardly have any prominent scars to show for damages.

Many cryptocurrencies entered the weekend with little or no significant losses, except for the obvious 9% decline of Algorand. The blockchain token now trades at $0.77 according to Coin metrics.

Amidst this hovering cloud in the crypto world – direct consequences of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine – a couple of cryptocurrencies surged over the past weekend. Terra’s LUNA was up by 14%, trading for $86 while NEAR protocol added 13% to reach $10.43. 

Bitcoin Mining Ban

About a week ago, the European Union added a provision, calling for a ban on energy intensive Proof-of-work (PoW) crypto mining operations, in a bid to draft a new set of regulations.

If this ban had been approved, this would mean all Bitcoin mining operations would automatically become illegal. This would have been a heavy blow on the world’s largest cryptocurrency, considering all that investors have had to deal with as a result of the on-going crisis in Ukraine.

Thankfully, voting in the legislation concerning the ban had been delayed over concerns that the ban might be misinterpreted by the public as “de facto Bitcoin ban” according to the chairman of the European Parliament’s Economic Committee, Stefan Berger.

On Tuesday last week, Mr Berger confirmed to the press that the paragraph stating the ban was removed entirely.

Furthermore, the Russia-Ukraine conflict has prompted Federal Reserve chairperson, Jerome Powell to press for U.S crypto regulation during the testimony before the House Financial Service Committee last Wednesday.

Speaking of the Ukraine conflict, the crowdfunding that started via Twitter on the 26th of February in a bid to assist the Ukrainian military has reached a massive $50 million in digital assets. This was reported on Thursday, with Bitcoin being the most donated digital currency.

KPMG Purchases NFT Right After Bitcoin Purchase

The multinational professional service network and one of the big four accounting organizations, KPMG kicked off the week with some unexpected news.

The organization purchased a ‘world of women’ NFT. They made this public via their twitter handle in the early hours of this morning. Although this may not be the accounting firm’s first involvement with Crypto – given its previous purchase of Bitcoins – but to have one of the “big four” involved in NFTs is definitely a huge plus for the crypto world.