Bitcoin Climbs 3% to Retake $68K With Solana Outperforming, Ether Showing Relative Weakness

Cryptocurrencies rallied on Thursday, reversing what had been a slight downturn since bitcoin’s (BTC) failed attempt to regain $70,000 very early on Monday.

The CoinDesk 20 – an index of the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization excluding stablecoins and exchange coins – was up over 2.7% in the past 24 hours, with Uniswap’s (UNI) and bitcoin cash (BCH) leading the charge, each gaining more than 5%.

Bitcoin at press time was changing hands at $68,100, ahead 2.9% over the past 24 hours. Ether (ETH) continued to underperform bitcoin and the broader market, gaining just 1.1% and touching a new 3.5 year low relative to the price of BTC. Solana (SOL) continued to outperform, rising 3.0% and marking a new record high relative to ether.

Ether is now notably just over $2,500, but below the max pain price – the level at which most options expire worthless – of $2,600 for Deribit’s options expiry on Oct. 25.

Ether continues to languish behind bitcoin and solana in terms of performance. In the past month, ether is down 2.1%, while bitcoin is up 7.4% and solana has added 18%.

“I think from a pure on-chain perspective there has generally been an outperformance of network activity in both Bitcoin and Solana vis-à-vis Ethereum,” Andre Dragosch, European Head of Research at crypto investment firm Bitwise, told CoinDesk.

“Transaction count on Bitcoin has outpaced that of Ethereum, which tends to be highly correlated with the relative performance,” Dragosch said, noting that there had been “stronger on-chain capital inflows into bitcoin [than] ether.”

“In this context, it’s not so much a weakness of ether but rather a strength of bitcoin,” Dragosch added.

The nominal market capitalization difference between bitcoin and ether has reached a new all-time high. With bitcoin at a $1.33 trillion market cap and ether at $303.6 billion, the difference is now over $1 trillion for the first time ever.

Solana’s market capitalization dominance, currently at 3.64% of the crypto market, is approaching its old record of 3.70%.

MicroStrategy (MSTR) added another 10% on Thursday, reaching its strongest level since the dot com bubble 25 years ago.

The company is in a unique position because it was completely misunderstood, well-followed capital advisor Punter Jeff told CoinDesk.

“Never before has a company converted its balance sheet entirely into a finite asset, let alone a revolutionary asset like Bitcoin,” Jeff said. “It positions MicroStrategy as a pioneer in corporate finance while establishing a significant competitive moat; it holds over 2.25 times more Bitcoin than all other publicly traded companies combined that have Bitcoin on their balance sheets.”

Other crypto names posting gains included Coinbase (COIN), adding 5% and bitcoin miner Riot Platforms (RIOT) rising 4.3%.