Bitcoin, Ether drop; US stocks rise as inflation cools
Bitcoin dipped in Monday morning trade in Asia but held above the $28,000 resistance level, while most other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies traded lower after a week left unresolved by US regulators’ lawsuits against the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance for alleged violation of trade rules. US stocks rose on Friday as the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge pointed to a slowdown in the economy and a potential end to the Fed’s tightening cycle.
Bitcoin fell 0.93% to US$28,111 in the 24 hours to 9:00 a.m. in Hong Kong, to add 0.35% for the past seven days, according to CoinMarketCap data. The world’s largest cryptocurrency fell to a low of $26,677 last Tuesday following the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) lawsuit against Binance, and has recovered 5.37% since then.
Ethereum fell 1.27% to $1,790, but traded up 0.61% for the week. The Ethereum blockchain’s Shanghai hard fork, which includes an update that will allow investors to withdraw their stake in ETH for the first time, is scheduled for April 12, the Ethereum Foundation announced last week.
Dogecoin led losses with a fall of 5.92% in the last 24 hours to trade at $0.07871, but had a weekly gain of 5.67%. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose tweets have caused price movements on the meme coin, is reportedly seeking to dismiss a US$258 billion price manipulation lawsuit, Reuters reported on Saturday.
XRP rose 3.06% to $0.5192 for a weekly gain of 15.57%. Behind XRP’s rally is growing optimism that Ripple Labs, whose crypto-payment platform is powered by XRP, would end its ongoing lawsuit against the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which accused the company and its executives of violating securities laws.
Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse asked US officials to take note of the SEC’s enforcement actions Twitter last Friday. SEC Chairman Gary Gensler requested $2.4 billion in funding from Congress last Wednesday to intensify the agency’s crackdown on cryptocurrency abuse.
The total crypto market cap fell by 1.10% in the last 24 hours to $1.17 trillion. The total trading volume in the last 24 hours increased by 2.96% to 31.79 billion USD.
In the non-fungible token (NFT) market, the Forkast 500 NFT index rose 0.37% to 4,067.30 as of 09:00 in Hong Kong, up 0.85% for the week. The index is a proxy measure of the performance of the global NFT market and includes 500 eligible smart contracts on a given day. It is administered by Discard Labs data branch, CryptoSlam.
Discard SOL NFT Composite, which tracks the performance of the Solana NFT market, rose 1.03% for the day to 1,215.36, posting a weekly gain of 5.07%, following the migration of DeGods – a Solana-based NFT pool – to the Ethereum blockchain. NFT trading activity picked up as investors expected the price of DeGods to rise on Ethereum, as it had with Y00ts, a pool that began migrating to Polygon earlier last week.
US stocks closed up on Friday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.26%, the S&P 500 rose 1.44%, and the Nasdaq Composite Index rose 1.74.
The US personal consumption price index, which excludes food and energy, rose 0.3% in February, less than the 0.4% expected. The economic reading points to a slowdown in inflation, and could offset the Fed’s tendency for more aggressive rate hikes, which raised rates to 4.75% to 5% in March, the highest level since 2007.
New York Fed President John Williams said last Friday that he expects the annual US inflation rate to fall to 3.25% by 2023, falling below the Fed’s long-term target of 2% over the next two years, stressing that price stability remains is the Fed’s peak. concern despite the turmoil in the banking system.
Analysts at CME Group remain mixed on the Fed’s next move on interest rates, which will be made at the next Fed meeting on May 3. 50.4% of analysts predict no interest rate hike, while 49.6% expect an increase of 25 basis points.
US stock futures traded mixed from 09:00 in Hong Kong, as investors await a series of US economic data this week, including the manufacturing purchasing managers’ index on Monday. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures rose 0.10%, S&P 500 futures fell 0.24% and the Nasdaq Composite Index fell 0.63%.
