As the year approaches its close, Bitcoin is consolidating and retaining a dominant share of overall crypto market value while many smaller tokens lag in attention. In this environment, three sub-$1 projects are drawing interest: Bitcoin Hyper with a presale above $29.7 million and 39% APY staking, Maxi Doge with over $4.3 million raised and a 72% APY offer, and Midnight’s NIGHT token trading below $0.10. These altcoins position themselves around Bitcoin Layer 2 DeFi access, trader-focused meme coin utilities, and Cardano-linked privacy infrastructure heading into 2026.

Ethereum’s price is still capped below the $3,000 level and the 200-day exponential moving average, even as exchange balances continue to decline and whale accumulation grows. Futures market data shows that over 70% of open ETH perpetual positions are long, creating a crowded leverage setup with elevated liquidation risk. Momentum indicators remain subdued, pointing to a coiled market structure that could precede a sharp volatility spike.

CryptoQuant reports Binance XRP futures open interest has dropped to about $453 million, the lowest since the end of 2024. OI previously topped $1 billion earlier and mid-2025 during speculative surges but has trended lower as leverage unwinds. XRP is near $1.87 after slipping below $2.00 and $1.90, with mixed on-chain signals.

Shiba Inu has declined 14.53% so far in December 2025, continuing a pattern of negative December performance that dates back to 2020. The token is trading around $0.000007174 on Christmas Day, with volume down 10.29% to $77.93 million amid lighter holiday activity. Bulls are watching for a possible Santa Claus Rally toward $0.00000765, while key resistance sits at $0.00000843 and $0.00001125 and support is expected near the $0.000007 area.

On Dec. 25, XRP traded near $1.86, dipped, and recovered toward $1.87, finishing the holiday session in the green. According to CoinGlass, the last hour saw $12,510 in liquidations, mostly $11,802 in shorts, while the 24-hour total reached $828,440 with longs leading $481,670 versus $346,760 in shorts.

Rippled version 3.0.0 for the XRP Ledger, released earlier in December, introduces five new amendments that are now in the validator voting phase. These changes refine price oracles, MPT escrows, AMM clawbacks, ledger entry fields and MPT payment metadata. Additional amendments for a protocol-native lending system, Dynamic MPT and fixDelegateV1_1 remain disabled but are expected to reach validator voting in late January 2026.

On Christmas, Shiba Inu's burn rate reportedly surged 505.74%, with 5,984,918 SHIB destroyed over a 24-hour period while the token traded around $0.00000719. Despite the headline jump in burns against a backdrop of over 410.75 trillion SHIB already removed from the initial supply, the price action stayed slightly negative and continued to reflect a pattern of lower highs into late December.

Finbold's analysis on December 25, 2025 highlighted OFFICIAL TRUMP (TRUMP) and Cosmos (ATOM) as candidates to revisit $1 billion market caps in 2026. TRUMP traded around $4.96, up 2.6% in 24 hours after a $24.8 million unlock on December 22, while ATOM climbed just over 3% to near a $966 million valuation following a THORChain beta on December 23.