Bitcoin, Ethereum Post Modest Thanksgiving Gains as Crypto Market Claws Back $12B

Bitcoin and Ethereum both rose several points on Thanksgiving day, as the bearish pressure of FTX's collapse appears to be waning.

By Liam J. Kelly

BTC and ETH. Image: Shutterstock

Crypto markets appear to have turned a corner after the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto empire.

In the last 24 hours, Bitcoin has risen roughly 1.5% and is trading at just over $16,600. On the weekly, however, the market's largest cryptocurrency is still in the red, per CoinGecko. Ethereum also posted modest gains on Thanksgiving day, rising 4% in the past day and hitting $1,200 at press time.

Both tokens are, however, down a whopping 75% from their all-time highs set last winter.

The broader crypto market rose from just over $857 billion to $871 billion. Despite the roughly $12 billion reclaimed, the industry is still far from its peak capitalization of more than $3 trillion, which it reached roughly one year ago.

Besides the leading cryptocurrencies, the market's biggest 24-hour winners include Solana (SOL), Curve (CRV), Huobi (HT), and Chainlink (LINK).

Alongside Solana's steep, overnight recovery, which saw it rise 10% over the last 24h, various DeFi protocols built on the blockchain have also seen hefty rises in their Total Value Locked (TVL), per DeFiLlama.TVL is a rough (and controversial) measure of how much money is at work in a DeFi project. The biggest rises in TVL on Solana-based projects all revolve around liquid staking platforms like Lido, Marinade Finance, and JPool.

The reason behind CRV's 8.9% rise is likely due to a failed attempt yesterday to short the token and the release of more details of its upcoming stablecoin launch.

As for Huobi's 7.8% rise, the exchange's native token HT was recently listed on Bitfinex, with Huobi also siphoning off a hefty amount of liquidity due to the vacuum created by FTX's implosion. It is now the sixth-largest crypto exchange by 24-hour volume.

Finally, Chainlink's token has the imminent launch of a native staking service to thank for its near-7% jump. Staking will kick off in December with an aggregate size of 25 million LINK tokens in the initial pool, with the goal of expanding that figure to 75 million.

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