Cryptocurrencies, led by Bitcoin (BTC), traded in red at press time on Tuesday, with one lesser-known cryptocurrency bucking the trend.
What Happened
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At a time when the financial markets, in particular in Asia, are holding back over the fears related to the novel coronavirus outbreak in China, the cryptocurrency market has added value over the last month.
The digital currencies together have added about $48 billion to their market cap since the first death from the virus was reported on January 9.
As previously noted, it is difficult to establish a clear relation between the outbreak and the trading of cryptocurrencies.
The cryptocurrencies do take lesser influence from geopolitical events due to them not being limited by geographical borders, but don't yet have a reputation as a safe haven at par with gold or currencies like the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc.
The cryptocurrencies have mostly extended gains over the last seven days, but there's one that stands taller.
Tezos (XTZ), backing the namesake blockchain protocol, is up 28.16% over the last week. For comparison, Bitcoin is up 2.61%.
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Tezos is best-known for the proof-of-stake mining mechanism used in its blockchain protocol rather than the proof-of-work mechanism used in bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH) blockchains.
As Forbes noted on Monday, the cryptocurrency is up nearly 400% over 12 months. The massive rally has been fuelled on the back of Tezos's frequent partnerships with financial institutions across the world.
Another cryptocurrency that is similarly up over the week is IOTA (MIOTA). Unlike Tezos, the cryptocurrency is down 8% over the last 24 hours as the company's co-founders David Sonstebo and Sergey Ivancheglo had a public spat, that started with the latter accusing the former of embezzlement.
Both Sonstebo and Ivancheglo published their sides of the story in separate blog posts.
Price Action
Bitcoin traded 1.06% lower at $9,276.91 and continued its market domination at 65.2%.
Ethereum was down 0.94% at $188.36.
XRP (XRP), the cryptocurrency backing the Ripple payment network, traded 0.39% lower at about 25 cents.
Bitcoin hard fork Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was up 0.1% at $382.92; Bitcoin SV was down 2.23% at $276.51.
Stablecoin Tether traded around its intended price of $1. Tezos gained 3.58% at $1.98. IOTA was down 8% at about 32.5 cents.