Cryptocurrency prices today: Bitcoin, ether fall while dogecoin, Shiba Inu surge

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Cryptocurrency prices continued to plunge with Bitcoin hovering below the $24,000 level. The world's largest and most popular cryptocurrency was trading over a per cent lower at $23,988. The global crypto market cap today was above the $1 trillion mark, even as it was almost flat in the last 24 hours at $1.2 trillion, as per CoinGecko.

On the other hand, Ether, the coin linked to the ethereum blockchain and the second largest cryptocurrency, slipped marginally to $1,892. After years of delays, Ethereum's much anticipated software update Merge seems all but certain to take place in September, with the cryptography underlying the blockchain undergoing a radical shift to a system where the creation of new ether tokens becomes far less energy-intensive. 

Meanwhile, dogecoin price today was trading more than 8% higher at $0.08 whereas Shiba Inu also surged over 4% to $0.000016. Other crypto prices' today performance were mixed as BNB, Tether, Avalanche, Polygon, Apecoin, Chainlink prices were trading with cuts over the last 24 hours, whereas XRP, Uniswap, Tron, Litecoin, Polkadot, Stellar were trading with gains.

The three-largest US publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies Core Scientific Inc., Marathon Digital Holdings Inc. and Riot Blockchain Inc. lost over $1 billion in the second quarter after taking a series of impairment charges spurred by the collapse of cryptocurrency prices, as reported by Bloomberg.

Losses arising from cryptocurrency hacks jumped nearly 60% in the first seven months of the year to $1.9 billion, propelled by a surge in funds stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, according to blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. DeFi applications, many of which run on the Ethereum blockchain, are