The cryptocurrency market had a disappointing finish to the week on Friday and made it two consecutive days of declines.
This is the first time that this has happened since the end of October and leaves the entire value of the market at US$211.5 billion according to Coin Market Cap. Which is a decline of 1.9% since this time yesterday.
What happened?
It was another quiet 24 hours on the news front for cryptocurrencies. This left technical analysis to dictate the directions that coins took.
But one piece of news that caught my eye which I believe could be important further down the line relates to Ethereum.
According to a tweet by Afri Schoedon from Parity Technologies, the highly-anticipated upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain looks set to take place on January 16.
The new upgrade, which is named Constantinople, aims to improve the network's performance and scalability, allowing it to handle a larger number of transactions in a short space of time.
Schoedon said: "Constantinople upgrade for ethereum mainnet activation suggested for 16th of January 2019, block number to be confirmed on Black Friday in a fortnight."
Some crypto experts believe this upgrade could put Ethereum in a position to disrupt the financial system.
The reaction to the news, however, has so far been subdued. As you'll see below, this hasn't stopped ETH from falling with the rest of the market.
Here is the state of play on Saturday morning compared with 24 hours ago:
The Bitcoin (BTC) price has dropped a further 1.2% to US$6,384.52 per coin. This decline leaves the crypto giant with a market capitalisation of US$110.9 billion.
The Ethereum (ETH) price has fallen 2.1% to US$209.29 per token, reducing ETH's market capitalisation to US$21.6 billion.
The Ripple (XRP) price has tumbled 1.1% lower to 49.78 U.S. cents. This decline has reduced the XRP market capitalisation to US$20 billion.
The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) price has fallen a sizeable 7.4% to US$547.25 per token. This leaves the Bitcoin offshoot with a market capitalisation of US$9.55 billion. BCH had been a big mover recently ahead of its fork.
The EOS (EOS) price has fallen 3% to US$5.37 per token, reducing the EOS market capitalisation to US$4.8 billion.
Outside the top five the declines continued. Stellar (XLM) is down 2.1%, Litecoin (LTC) is off 2.8%, Cardano (ADA) is down 4.4%, and Monero (XMR) has fallen 3%. The only coin in the top ten in positive territory is Tether (USDT) with a 0.4% gain.
