What's New in Crypto: Bitcoin and Ethereum plunge as crypto market sheds $58 billion.

Crypto looks to be losing most of its new year gains, with Bitcoin and Ethereum showing significant weekly losses.

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It was a week of all-around losses, with adverse price action affecting investors of the two largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

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According to Trade Algo, the market leader Bitcoin (BTC) has only depreciated by 6% in the previous seven days and is now worth $23,136.

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At the same time frame, Ethereum lost 7% and was worth $1,604 at the start of the weekend.

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Polygon (MATIC) was one of the worst losers this week, falling 16.7% to $1.27 at the time of writing. On Tuesday, word came that Polygon Labs was cutting off 100 people (20% of its staff) as part of a restructuring.

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The next day, Polygon users were duped into believing the blockchain had been offline for two hours.

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Polygon subsequently disclosed that a few nodes on the network momentarily got out of sync, resulting in the outage of Polygonscan, an independent chain explorer. Polygonscan hadn't been updated with fresh Polygon blocks or transactions in a few hours, so some assumed Polygon had halted.

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Litecoin (LTC), Polkadot (DOT), and Cardano (ADA) all suffered large weekly losses ranging from 8% to 9%.

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Solana (SOL) was in free decline for much of last November and December due to its affiliation with officials from the defunct FTX exchange. It has managed to halt the losses since the New Year, with the asset decreasing only 1% this week. At the time of writing, it was trading at $22.4.

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The key reasons SOL held the fort this week were the news of the planned relocation of the Helium network to Solana and a significant increase in Solana NFT trading volumes.

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Similarly, the Uniswa token held off the bears, falling only 1.4% throughout the week and trading at $6.61.

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New restrictions are being suggested in Hong Kong, Canada, and the United States.

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With the failure of several high-profile crypto enterprises last year, including Terra, Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, and FTX, crypto regulation has been a reoccurring debate subject for governments throughout the world.

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This week's high-level crypto talk featured Hong Kong, Canada, and the United States, regulators.

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On Monday, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) released a consultation document proposing "to allow all categories of investors, including retail investors, to access trading services provided by licensed Virtual Assets trading platform providers."

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The idea suggests that prerequisites be satisfied before ordinary investors may trade cryptocurrency, such as expertise and risk evaluations, as well as limits on how much exposure traders can obtain. In addition, the Commission suggests that only "large-cap virtual assets" be eligible for regulated trade.

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On Wednesday, Hong Kong Finance Secretary Paul Chan described Web3 as a "golden opportunity" for the special administrative region, promising to "establish and lead a task force on virtual asset development, comprising representatives from key policy bureaux, financial regulators, and market players to make suggestions on the sector's sustainable and responsible growth."

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