Bitcoin, Ether fall; XRP Leads Losers as Top 10 Tokens Lose Steam; US stock futures flat
Bitcoin fell in early morning trading in Asia after failing to break the $30,000 resistance ceiling over the weekend. Ether fell below the US$1,900 mark, while other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies traded flat to lower. XRP led the losers. US stock futures traded flat after Wall Street’s Friday rally. Equity investors have the US consumer price index (CPI) out on Wednesday for the next look at the pace of inflation and a week ahead to see if concerns about the banking industry will ease.
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Top 10 Cryptos Losing Steam
Bitcoin fell 1.34% to US$28,594 in the 24 hours to 09:00 a.m. in Hong Kong, according to CoinMarketCap data, and lost 2.45% for the week. The world’s largest cryptocurrency hit a weekly high of $29,820 on Saturday, but then lost momentum.
US President Joe Biden is pushing for a tax on cryptocurrency miners equal to 30% of the cost of the power they use, which could add downward pressure on the crypto market as miners may need to sell more Bitcoin to stay profitable.
Ether fell 1.34% to $1,882, down 0.10% for the week. The second-largest cryptocurrency breached the $2,000 resistance level on Saturday, but later fell back. Etherscan data showed that the Ethereum Foundation moved about 15,000 Ether ($30 million) to crypto exchange Kraken, a move that usually precedes sales.
Most other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies recorded losses over the past 24 hours, with the exception of Litecoin, which rose 0.71% to US$84.48 but traded down 4.71% for the week.
XRP led the losers, falling 1.88% to $0.4514 and down 4.31% for the week.
Polkadot fell 0.40% to $5.64 and traded down 4.30% in the last seven days. Despite the price drop, the Polkadot blockchain is seeing increasing adoption from traditional finance. Deloitte, one of the Big Four accounting firms, said last Thursday that it had integrated the KLT protocol — a parachain of the Polkadot network — to improve the verification process in the company’s Know Your Customer/Know Your Business checks.
The total crypto market cap fell 1.03% in the last 24 hours to $1.18 trillion. Total trading volume fell 24.79% to $28.93 billion.
NFT
The indices are proxy measures of the performance of the global NFT market. They are managed by CryptoSlam, a sister company of Forkast.News under the Forkast.Labs umbrella.
In the non-fungible token (NFT) market, the Forkast 500 NFT index fell 1.81% to 3,524.43 in the 24 hours to 09:00 in Hong Kong, down 5.59% for the week.
The Ethereum blockchain saw its 24-hour NFT sales up 1.69% to $14.99 million, but also logged $11.11 million of “wash trades,” which rose 30.27%, according to data from CryptoSlam.
Wash trading involves an investor acting as both buyer and seller of an asset in order to generate deceptive trading volume and potentially manipulate prices. The practice is illegal in US securities markets.
“Vanity trades make up a significant percentage of monthly transactions and are still largely driven by traders’ breeding points on the Blur market,” according to Forkast Labs NFT strategist Yehudah Petscher in a comment on Saturday. He noted that “while the total USD volume of global sales has been up over the past seven days, the Forkast 500, with wash sales removed, shows that the NFT market is actually losing value and is down over 2%.”
Stock
U.S. stock futures traded flat to lower at 9 a.m. in Hong Kong. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures fell 0.07 percent. S&P 500 futures were down 0.10%. And Nasdaq Composite futures were 0.09% lower.
The three US stock indexes rose on Friday, helped by strong earnings at Apple and a 4.69% jump in the company’s share price on the day.
Concerns about the US banking industry eased somewhat after JPMorgan Chase upgraded the outlook of three US regional banks – Western Alliance Bancorp., Zions Bancorp. and Comerica Inc. — and said their share prices were “significantly mispriced,” according to Bloomberg on Saturday. Shares of lender PacWest Bancorp returned 81% on Friday after a 50% drop the previous day.
CPI figures for April due on Wednesday are forecast to rise 5.5% on the year, down slightly from 5.6% last month, according to Bloomberg on Sunday. The inflation figure is seen as a signal as to whether the Federal Reserve may pause interest rate hikes in June.
Meanwhile, concerns are raging that the US government could default on its debt as early as June, and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned again on Sunday that a constitutional crisis could be triggered if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling in time, according to Reuters.
The potential default by the US government could “negatively affect the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as part of a further risk-off approach by investors,” Mikkel Morch – chairman and non-executive director of crypto hedge fund ARK36 – said in an e- mail message statement Friday.
The Fed’s next move on interest rates will come on 14 June. Analysts at CME Group now expect a 90.4% chance that the Fed will keep interest rates unchanged at 5% to 5.25%, and a 9.6% chance of another 25 basis points. go.
(Corrects laundry trade figures in the second section of the NFT section.)
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