While XRP and Ether (ETH) continued to trade lower on Thursday, BTC (Bitcoin) showed an upward trend.

At press time, Bitcoin was trading at $10,407, an 82% increase. However, Bitcoin has been trading between $10,000 and $12,000 so far this month and has been trending downward, bottoming out around $9,700. On Thursday, Bitcoin pushed past the $10,000 threshold.

ETH, which is the number two cryptocurrency, has continued its steady decline. Ether has also declined by 1.99%, trading at just $188.32. Investors received more bad news when an announcement by a founding partner of a blockchain investment corporation was made on twitter regarding a Chinese Ponzi scheme that stole $3 billion dollars from them. The scam is known as PlusToken. Dovey Won, the founding partner of the blockchain investment group, has asked cybersecurity companies PeckShield and Chainalysis to further investigate the matter.

By market cap, XRP is the number two alt. It traded at $0.267 and by press time trended downward by 4.97%. As recent reports have indicated, Peter Brandt, a trader, accused XRP’s issuer, Ripple, of manipulating prices.

On Twitter, Brandt questioned whether Ripple would continue to influence the market so that XRP would stay above .2400. He feels that a breakdown at this level is coming and that .020725 is very likely.

While Brandt isn’t speaking hyperbolically, he adamantly believes that Ripple is manipulating the price of XRP. He uses the word manipulate because that is exactly what he feels Ripple has been doing since XRP was introduced. For months, a chart pattern showed how Ripple manipulated the price of XRP so that the markets would continue to support it. But should this support give way for any reason, Ripple will have to dump XRP.

Also at press time, Algorand (ALGO), the tenth top cryptocurrency, was trending downward by 12%, trading at $0.699. ALGO was scheduled to be listed on Coinbase Pro, a professional trading platform, on Thursday which associated in a price increase for other tokens like Chainlink (LINK).

According to another source, the total market capitalization for cryptocurrencies in the top 100 dropped to slightly over $270 billion dollars.