After finishing the first week of August with moderate gains, the cryptocurrency market ended the second week in the red. Bitcoin, which had previously shown gains of over 3%, led the market decline after plummeting from above $65,000 to close just above $63,200. The situation could have been even worse after the cryptocurrency dropped below $62,500 on August 14th, but a quick recovery helped limit Bitcoin's weekly losses to below 3.2%.
During the week, the latest inflation report and a lull in the Middle East conflict did help support global markets. However, in Bitcoin's case, the market was negatively impacted by Strategy's announcement at the beginning of the week that it had sold 1,690 Bitcoins last week. Although Strategy tried to calm the market by promising to resume purchases, this ultimately failed to bring Bitcoin back to pre-announcement levels.
The fall of the leading cryptocurrency alone led to a reduction in market capitalization of over $30 billion and left the market with minimal gains in mid-August.
Besides Bitcoin, several high-cap altcoins also showed a downward trend during this period, led by $XRP, which lost almost 4%. $XRP, one of the leaders at the start of the year, has been steadily declining and briefly fell below the $1 mark on August 11th following a sell-off. Although it later recovered above this threshold, the digital asset remains 69% below its January 2025 peak, which was close to $3.30.
The downward spiral of $XRP continues despite Ripple continuing to forge new partnerships and the digital asset becoming increasingly in demand. Nevertheless, some observers predict a further decline for $XRP, pointing to the $0.95 mark as the next target.
Meanwhile, according to market data, $XRP's losses were not the most significant. ADA, which had been rising since late July, fell by 10.6%, the biggest drop among leading digital assets. Bitcoin Cash and Zcash also showed notable declines — 6% and 5.6% respectively. XLM fell by 3.2%, WBT by 3%, and Ethereum closed down 2.1%.
While market-wide liquidations led to a sharp drop in most digital assets, a separate group of leaders showed a strong counter-trend rally. Chainlink (LINK) led the gains, rising 13% thanks to an optimistic forecast from Standard Chartered predicting the token's value will reach $200 by the end of 2030. Hyperliquid (HYPE) also demonstrated sustained buyer demand, rising 5.8% — from $54.73 to $57.90 over six days.
Meanwhile, mid-cap and utility tokens also showed double-digit gains, led by World Liberty Financial (WLFI), which rose 15%, as well as Worldcoin (WLD) and OKB, which gained 11.4% and 10.9% respectively.
As the number of tokens that fell in price exceeded the number that rose, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization decreased from nearly $3 trillion on August 10th to $2.22 trillion at the time of writing (August 16th, 13:45 EST).
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