Cryptocurrencies gain traction as flight-to-safety dominates markets

The ongoing political drama in Italy continues to hurt the market sentiment on Tuesday. Most of the major European equity indices finished the day more than 1% lower, and the Wall Street opened in the red. Moreover, the yield of the 10-year US T-bond, which is seen as a traditional safe-haven, lost over 2%. Reflecting the flight-to-safety, the CBOE Volatility Index (.VIX), Wall Street's fear gauge, was up nearly 14% at the time of writing.

While all the risk-carrying assets are suffering notable losses, cryptocurrencies are recording substantial gains, supporting the view of cryptos having a strong positive correlation with safer assets. In fact, the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies increased more than $20 billion in the last 24 hours to surpass $320 billion. 

The largest cryptocurrency with regards to the market cap, Bitcoin, has added more than 2% against the USD and was last seen trading at $7437 while Ripple and Ethereum were up 4.3% and 2% respectively. The only cryptocurrency that is in the top 50, and is failing to take advantage of the positive sentiment in the crypto space, seems to be EOS, which came under pressure following a report that revealed critical vulnerabilities in the EOS blockchain. On the other hand, Nano, #34 with a market cap over $500 million, is the best performing crypto in that list with an impressive 14% increase vs. the greenback.