Highlights April 19: Cryptos in the green despite bearish prognosis

The crypto markets were higher this morning, with the majority of the top 10 cryptos registering gains over the past 24 hours. The dire predictions of a market crash, made by Fortune and other leading media, have not materialized.

The announcement that Russia might accept crypto as legal tender has not impacted the markets as much as expected.

Top cryptos

Bitcoin climbed around 5%, trading above $40,000 at the time of writing. Ethereum was up around 4%, and Cardano, XRP, and Solana all recorded gains of around 5%.

The biggest gainer in the top 10 is Terra, up 15% at time of writing. Terra announced the introduction of self-repaying loans and its stablecoin UST surpassed its rival BUSD, Binance’s stablecoin, by market cap.

At #16, NEAR Protocol is up 13%, once again picking up a recent bullish trend.

Top movers

Outside the top 20, ApeCoin jumped around 9%. Most other cryptos also registered gains. All top 100 coins are in the green except Stacks and Decred, which were the only two in the green yesterday.

The biggest winners are ICON and the Sandbox’ SAND wth 12%, Loopring with 11%, Zcash with 15%, and THORChain with 16%. Privacy coins are increasing in value.

STEPN’s GMT token is the biggest gainer by far, having added 40% to its value at the time of writing. Stepn announced a revised GEM (mystery box) system and reached the important milestone of 300,000 DAU (Daily Active Users).

Recently, they launched STEPN x ASICS NFTs, a unique collection of NFT sneakers in partnership with premier sports brand ASICS. It is available on Binance’s NFT marketplace. All of these factors contributed to spectacular price growth.