Crypto Majors Slide Further; SOL, DOGE Among Worst Affected

This article originally appeared in First Mover, CoinDesk's daily newsletter, putting the latest moves in crypto markets in context.

Cryptocurrency prices fell further on Monday, with some of the major altcoins and meme coins leading the decline.

Solana (SOL) and dogecoin (DOGE) were among the worst hit, falling 4.5% and 10%, respectively, over the past 24 hours. Bitcoin dropped below the round figure of $66,000, trading around $65,300, down 0.9%, while ether fell over 3.25% to trade at $3,400.

The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), which measures the broader digital asset market, slid just over 3% over the past 24 hours.

Meanwhile, bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) continued to see outflows, with $145 million in outflows on Monday.

Dogecoin bulls liquidated $60 million in long trades on Monday, faring worse than their BTC counterparts, an unusual occurrence in the crypto futures market. The figures mark the biggest hit DOGE has taken since May 2021. BTC long bets lost $47 million and ether suffered worse than either of them at $76 million.

Overall, crypto longs lost over $440 million as profit-taking and dollar strength weighed on the market, traders said. Open interest, or the number of unsettled futures bets, has dropped 16% to $600 million.

Meanwhile, a long-short ratio tracking dogecoin futures shows traders are positioning for further declines, with the ratio at 0.94 – indicating a bearish bias. A ratio below one indicates more traders are betting on dogecoin to continue falling.

Layer-2 blockchain ZKsync kicked off its airdrop on Monday, with 45% of the tokens claimed in under two hours. The ZK token opened at $0.31 and is down about 32% since then, according to CoinGecko data. The market capitalization stands at about $800 million, based on the circulating supply, with about 3.7 billion tokens eligible to be distributed. On a fully diluted basis, the market cap would be $4.5 billion.

Cryptocurrency exchanges Binance, Bybit and KuCoin have currently listed the ZK token, even though Binance had earlier said it would postpone the listing after experiencing technical issues with its node.