Ethereum is the second most valuable cryptocurrency again!

Over the past few days, there was a serious battle for the second spot in the top of cryptocurrencies. Ripple was having an excellent run, surpassing Ethereum and maintaining its position for about the week. However, Ethereum managed to regain its position as the world’s second most valuable crypto coin!

Not a great day for science

On Monday, XRP prices fell by almost 25%, currently trading at under $2.50, while ETH rose slightly, with 2.5%, reaching $1,155. Considering all this, Ripple’s market cap went down to $98.5 billion and Ethereum was lifted to $111.9 billion, says a report from CoinMarketCap, quoted by Fortune.com.

As for Bitcoin, on the other side, it still maintains on the first position, with a total valuation of $255.1 billion.

This Monday was very intense for the cryptocurrency world, after some reports claiming that the Chinese government, home of the world’s biggest Bitcoin mining operation, is planning an “orderly exit” from the cryptocurrency mining business.

After news about this emerged, CoinMarketCap announced that they will remove data from South Korea-based exchanges in its calculation of asset prices. This removal was considered an across-the-board sell off-triggering panicked selling from investors, as they weren’t announced about this change immediately.

“First, it was due to capital flows with investors realizing their profits from cryptocurrencies,” said Iqbal Gandham, Managing Director at cryptocurrency exchange eToro. “Secondly, a data adjustment by CoinMarketCap, the most popular site for cryptocurrency pricing data, removed South Korean exchanges from its site, which have been known to trade much higher than the rest of the world.”

Ripple broke record after record for a few days

Last week, Ripple’s price rose as high as $3.65, but investors were expecting to see it going down after US-based exchange Coinbase rejected the rumors about the possibility of allowing trading of XRT in the near future.

“As of the date of this statement, we have made no decision to add additional assets to either GDAX or Coinbase,” a Coinbase representative said a few days ago. “Any statement to the contrary is untrue and not authorized by the company.”

Investors were also worried about Ripple becoming a bubble, after rising over 900 percent in the past month alone.