By Yasin Ebrahim
Investing.com – Bitcoin rebounded Monday following last week's rout to a seven-week low as investors bought the dip and signs of mining activity steadied.
BTC/USD rose 8.4% to $54,151 after falling below $50,000 last week.
The wave of investors who took advantage of the dip, helped steady the crypto market, pushing the total market cap back above $2 trillion.
The selloff last week is believed to be have been caused by several factors including bitcoin miners scaling back operations in Xinjiang, China, following a power outage. Miners play an important role in maintaining the plumbing of the network, or blockchain, that powers bitcoin.
"Essentially, you can think of cryptocurrency miners as the engine that keeps the bitcoin network running — responsible for the validation of all transactions that take place on the network," according to Canaan CEO Nangeng Zhang.
The mean hashrate of the Bitcoin network fell to 131.796 exahashes per second on Friday, its lowest level since December 2020, but has rebounded to about 150 exhhashes per second, according to data from Blockchain.com.
The rebound in cryptocurrencies on Monday also signaled an increasing appetite for alternative cryptos, an indication that bitcoin, while the dominate crypto, is not the only game in town for investors.
Bitcoin’s dominance rate - the ratio of BTC market cap over total market cap – looks increasing vulnerable to a break below 50% for the first time since August 2018 after falling just below that level last week as alt coin gain momentum.
ETH/USD rose 8.9% to $2,503, while XRP/USD was up 21.6% to $1.33169, and ADA/USD was up 11.1% to $1.2395.