@$20006: ApeCoin Skyrockets 16% Daily, Bitcoin Taps $20K (Weekend Watch)

After the recent volatility and price declines, bitcoin finally saw some relief by touching $20,000.

Most altcoins have seen slight gains as well. Once again, though, Ripple stands out as the best performer from the larger-cap alts, while ApeCoin has soared by 16%.

BTC Back at $20K

It’s safe to say that the past week or so didn’t go all that well for the primary cryptocurrency. The asset had spiked to a multi-week high at just under $23,000 on September 13, but the overall bearish sentiment and the US CPI numbers brought it down quickly.

In a matter of a day, bitcoin found itself fighting to stay above $20,000. Although it did so initially, it inevitably fell below it at the end of the working week.

BTC’s weekly low came at $19,300, marked on Friday, but the asset reacted somewhat positively at that point and bounced off by a few hundred dollars.

It kept climbing in on Saturday and early on Sunday, and thus it currently exceeds $20,000. Nevertheless, its market cap is still below $400 billion, while its dominance over the altcoins has stalled at 39.5%.

BTCUSD. Source: TradingView

XRP, APE on the Go

Ever since the much-hyper Ethereum Merge took place on Thursday, the price of the native cryptocurrency has struggled. Initially, it reacted calmly to the PoW-to-PoS change but began its freefall in the following hours.

Thus, ETH dumped from $1,600 to a multi-week low beneath $1,400 in about a day. As of now, the second-largest crypto stands at $1,450 after a minor daily increase.

Similar gains are evident from Binance Coin, Cardano, Solana, Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and MATIC from the larger-cap alts.

Interestingly, Ripple has once again outperformed all others in the top 10 with another massive surge. An 11% increase has pushed XRP to just under $0.4.

ApeCoin has emerged as the biggest gainer from the mid-cap alts. APE is up by over 16% on a 24-hour scale and trades well above $5.5.

Nevertheless, the crypto market cap has remained still below the $1 trillion mark.