Today's cryptocurrency price calls as ether drops over 10 percent and Bitcoin falls below USD 19,000. The second-largest token, Ether, continued to fall Monday, hitting cryptocurrency prices, which were also negatively impacted by the potential for a wave of global monetary tightening this week. Bitcoin, the biggest and most well-known cryptocurrency in the world, was trading more than 6 percent lower at USD 18,830, falling under the USD 19,000 threshold. According to CoinGecko, the market valuation of all cryptocurrencies dipped below USD 1 trillion today after declining more than 4 percent over the previous day to USD 974 billion.

However, Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency and token connected to the Ethereum blockchain, fell more than 10 percent to a two-month low of USD 1,370. The hype surrounding an upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain caused an increase in the price of ether since mid-June, but now that the upgrade is complete, it is quickly declining. Investors are preparing for volatility as a result of the Federal Reserve's anticipated this week big interest-rate boost to combat pricing pressure. 

According to the network's engineers, Ethereum's redesign makes it far more energy efficient and opens the door for it to scale and become faster. Years in the works, the transition from a proof-of-work strategy to a so-called proof-of-stake approach appears to have gone without a hitch, while snags are still possible.

The merging is just the first in a series of enhancements to Ethereum that will increase its scalability and decentralisation. The second-largest cryptocurrency still faces several obstacles, including a potential response from regulators.

Shiba Inu fell more than 9 percent to USD 0.000011 while Dogecoin's price today was also trading roughly 7 percent down at USD 0.05. As prices for XRP, Uniswap, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, Binance USD, Polkadot, Litecoin, Apecoin, Cardano, Stellar, Chainlink, Tron, and Tether have been falling over the past 24 hours, other cryptocurrencies' performance today has also decreased.

In other news, the price of Ripple's connected cryptocurrency XRP dropped as much as 12 percent following reports that Ripple Labs Inc. and the US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) are requesting an urgent judgement in a court lawsuit over the token. According to the SEC, Ripple acted irresponsibly when it asserted that XRP is not a regulated security, as per reports.

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