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Let’s take a look at what happened in the crypto industry over the weekend with U.Today’s top three news stories.

$83 billion in Bitcoin (BTC) in 24 hours: What's happening?

On Friday, Aug. 2, huge Bitcoin trading activity was spotted as bulls showed great interest in the flagship crypto, attempting to push the price higher following BTC's price drop. According to CoinGlass, the trading volume of Bitcoin jumped by 25.61% that day, with traders injecting almost $83 billion into the market in the last 24 hours. Thanks to support from bulls, the total market capitalization of BTC currently reaches $1.27 trillion. First place in terms of the most trading activity was taken by Binance, with a volume of $23.56 billion. It was followed by Bitget at $14.51 billion, Bybit at $11.07 billion and OKX at $10.77 billion.

Shiba Inu confirms death cross amid major sell-off

Yesterday, Aug. 4, Shiba Inu's four-hour chart demonstrated the occurrence of a death cross signal, as the 50-period moving average has crossed below the 200-period moving average. This happens when the meme coin's price continues to decline for the eighth consecutive day, bringing SHIB to levels that made the market pay close attention. The formation of the death cross pattern on SHIB's four-hour chart indicates an intensifying of the bearish momentum in the short term. According to CoinMarketCap data, at the moment of writing, SHIB is changing hands at $0.0000126, down 7.38% over the past 24 hours.

Massive 500 million XRP unlocked by Ripple as XRP gains 5.56%

Following Ripple's traditional funds withdrawal from escrow on Aug. 1-2, when the company released one billion XRP coins, another large amount of XRP was spotted leaving the same source. Data provided by Whale Alert blockchain tracker reveals that Ripple unleashed 500 million XRP on Saturday, Aug. 3. This impressive sum is valued at approximately $282 million in fiat. As stated in Ripple's recent report, the company still holds a massive 4.682 billion XRP in its cold crypto wallets. Recall that Ripple has been releasing XRP from escrow on a monthly basis for the past seven years to support the coin’s liquidity on the market and provide some XRP coins to its institutional clients working with payments.