Ether and altcoins lead crypto rout as Terra DeFi fallout deepens

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

altcoins such as Ether, Solana and Avalanche take a beating. Traders are partially stumped, but for Ethereum, the signs of a lack of demand have been building for quite some time. The impact of the collapse of Terra, a blockchain ecosystem that supported one of the biggest experiments in decentralized finance, knocked an already bearish market into wild contagion this month. While Terra’s operators had passed a revival plan to start afresh on a totally new blockchain on Wednesday, investors in the rest of DeFi were less than convinced. A glitch in the process to make the Ethereum network less energy intensive added to the concern. “Bearish sentiment remains the theme for cryptos,” said Edward Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda. He noted that Ethereum’s growing list of competitors could make the fallout from unexpected hitches to its update, known as the Merge, particularly intense.

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Ether was down as much as 11% on Thursday before paring losses to around $1,850, far below the key threshold of $2,000 which it needs to trade above meaningfully — and soon — if bearish sentiment is to ease. Other tokens linked to protocols popular with decentralized finance projects like Avalanche, Solana and Polkadot were also slumping, down between 11% and 17% over the last 24 hours.Bitcoin acted as somewhat of a haven, paring losses to around 1% after dropping to as low as $28,007. Still, the largest cryptocurrency decoupled Thursday from US equities after recently mirroring price changes in risk assets in recent weeks. Stocks continued to rebound from the lowest levels in