Crypto Market Tumbles After Russia Declares Military Operation in Ukraine; StarkNet Launched

Chart of the Day

Today kicked off on a very sobering note indeed. On Thursday morning (Asian trading hours), Russia announced a "special military operation" that escalated geopolitical tensions in the region. On the back of this, the broader crypto market shed around 5% of its total market value in a matter of hours. BTC has since plunged below the $35k resistance zone, posting an 8% loss within the past 24 hours in the process of doing so. Most altcoins were hit even harder than BTC. ETH, for one, nosedived by a significant 11% within a similar timeframe, and is currently trading below the $2,350 level (as of the time of writing). In a similar vein, most other major altcoins also experienced double-digit percentage losses from 24 hours ago amidst a raging sea of red. This bearish outlook is clearly reflected within the decentralized finance (DeFi) space too. For example, and as can be seen from the chart above, the amount of WBTC on the Ethereum network has been stagnating at approximately 260,000 units for the past two months or so. Unfortunately, this is not a situation that is unique to WBTC — the total TVL in DeFi protocols has already fallen by a whopping 20% from the all-time high value that was achieved just a mere few months ago in December 2021. 





Talk of the Town

In some better news, Ethereum scaling solution StarkNet is now primed and ready for the deployment of decentralized apps (dApps) on its platform. StarkNet is a permissionless version of the StarkEx platform that leverages zero knowledge rollups to power faster transactions at lower costs on the Ethereum network, and in its current iteration, it allows for virtually anyone to deploy a dApp on its platform. Over the next few months, StarkNet will be focusing on scaling up the platform's transaction throughputs so as to substantially increase the number of transactions that it can process. How this plays out remains to be seen, but these are definitely exciting times for the StarkNet team indeed!