This week saw the total cryptocurrency market capitalization soar above $1.3 trillion on the back of major increases from many coins. The sentiment has also improved considerably across the board.

Bitcoin’s price managed to top the coveted $30K level – a point that we haven’t seen in 10 months. The week started relatively quiet as everyone was expecting the release of the Consumer Price Index. It’s largely used to gauge inflation in the US. Before its release, however, things took a somewhat unexpected turn, and the price shot up to $30K and remained there for a while.

On April 12th, Ethereum went through the so-called Shanghai upgrade. It’s also referred to as the Shapella upgrade. Its name aside, the landmark network update finally enables validators to unstake the ETH they’ve been locking up to secure the network for years. Many predicted that this would flood the market with a tremendous supply of ETH. This wasn’t the case.

A lot of altcoins followed suit, with some of them charting truly remarkable gains in the past seven days. Examples include Radix (XRD) – up around 65%, Injective (INJ) – up about 34%, Render (RNDR) – up 32%, and Arbitrum (ARB) – up around 26.5%.

(by George Georgiev)