Crypto On Feb 8: Top Coins Gain, Market Cap Touches $2T After A Long Break

In what comes as good news for investors, the global cryptocurrency market cap surpassed the $2 trillion mark after weeks of wallowing in bearishness. Top coins including Bitcoin and Shiba Inu continued to gain, bringing relief to investors who had piled on the token when the market was at a peak in November only to see it trend down steadily after that.

As of 2.07 a.m. ET on Tuesday, Bitcoin was trading 4.45% higher at $44,662. Ethereum, too, gained 2.62%, CoinMarketCap data showed.

Crypto exchange WazirX's Trade Desk believes that one of the key drivers for the top two tokens could be KPMG, one of the big four accounting firms, adding Bitcoin and Ethereum to their corporate treasury.

Barring a slight downward movement in USD Coin price, all the top 10 tokens were trading higher. Meme crypto Shiba Inu gained 20.18%. Dogecoin, too, surged.

Industry insiders attributed the bullishness to a number of factors, including the regularity clarity coming from several governments around the world.

Another news point that provided buoyancy to the market was Layer 2 Ethereum scaling solutions startup Polygon raising $450 million at an undisclosed valuation. The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital. Polygon (MATIC) prices soared above $2, gaining more than 15% in the last few hours.

"Ethereum whales also started accumulating the token. On the hourly chart, the MATIC trend has broken out of the channel pattern. The next resistance is expected at $2.4 level," the WazirX trade desk told International Business Times.

In other news, Google Cloud has unveiled Virtual Machine Threat Detection (VMTD), which will detect any malware that mines cryptocurrency on a compromised Cloud account. The development comes after the company noted last year that cybercriminals were hacking Google Cloud accounts to mine cryptocurrency.