For most of the working week, the primary cryptocurrency’s exchange rate remained largely unchanged, remaining in a narrow range between $30K and $31K. However, events on Thursday night involving a legal battle between Ripple and the SEC led to a shift in favour of the blockchain company and its cryptocurrency.

Although bitcoin has recovered from that level and is now some distance above it, it is down 3% for the day. Bitcoin’s market capitalisation has fallen to $590 billion after surpassing the $610 billion mark yesterday. Bitcoin’s share of the alternative cryptocurrency market is almost unchanged at 48.4 per cent.

Expectedly, the Ripple token showed the strongest growth after the judge’s ruling. At one point, it rose almost 100%, hitting $0.95 for the first time since December 2021. This led to a lot of shorts being closed. However, even that didn’t help it stay high, and it fell back to $0.8 yesterday. A new decline of 8 per cent during the day took it down to $0.72. Litecoin, Polygon, Bitcoin Cash and others suffered similar losses.

Major altcoins also suffered losses, including ETH, BNB, ADA, SOL, DOT and TRX. Of the few exceptions, the two largest memcoins, DOGE and SHIB, are up about 5% on the day.OP Optimism has gained 7.5% in the past 24 hours to hit $1.5.

However, the total cryptocurrency market is down more than $30 billion since yesterday to $1.220 trillion according to CMC.