Bitcoin, Ether Inflate As Investors Await Comments From US Federal Reserve Bank; Reject NFT 500 Index falls 0.44%
Bitcoin and Ether rose in Tuesday afternoon trade in Asia, along with most other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies. Polygon’s Matic token led gains followed by XRP and Dogecoin. The new Forkast NFT 500 index fell, and Chinese stock markets led losses in Asia on weak trade data. Investors await comments from US central bank chief Jerome Powell later today for clarity on the central bank’s interest rates.
Bitcoin rose 0.14% to US$22,434 in the 24 hours to 4pm in Hong Kong on Tuesday. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has lost 3.57% on the week, according to CoinMarketCap data. Ether rose 0.61% to $1,571, after losing 3.07% in the past seven days.
Polygon’s Matic token was the biggest gainer of the day, rising 2.57% to US$1.16, but lost 5.31% for the week. XRP was the next best performer, gaining 1.84% to change hands at $0.37, although it fell 1.2% on the week.
Dogecoin rallied 1.24% to $0.07496, but has lost 7.87% in the past seven days of trading.
The global cryptocurrency market capitalization increased by 0.3% to $1.03 trillion, while the total crypto market volume rose 11.82% to $33.01 billion in the last 24 hours.
Chinese stock markets led losses in Asia on Tuesday. The Shanghai Composite lost 1.11%, the Shenzhen Component Index fell 1.98%, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index fell 0.33%. China’s exports in January and February fell 6.8% from a year earlier, while imports shrank 10.2% due to weaker commodity prices and a stronger dollar.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 0.25% and South Korea’s Kospi rose 0.03%.
European shares were largely flat in anticipation of US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s testimony before Congress, which will give investors clues on the US Federal Reserve’s monetary policy path. Germany’s DAX 40 rose 0.14% while the STOXX 600 rose 0.15%.
European investors digested hawkish comments from European Central Bank (ECB) board member Robert Holzmann, who called for four more rate hikes of 50 basis points each. The ECB already promised to raise interest rates by 50 basis points on March 16.
Discard the NFT 500 index, which was released on Tuesday, fell 0.44% to 4,281.36 in the last 24 hours to 4 pm on Tuesday in Hong Kong. The Discard NFT 500 Index is a proxy measure of the performance of the global NFT market, and includes 500 eligible smart contracts on a given day.
Sales of Ethereum, the leading blockchain network for NFTs, increased 35.48% to US$23.5 million, according to Cryptoslam.io data. The number of on-chain transactions on the network fell 14.6% to 124,703.
Sales of Solana, the second largest NFT blockchain, rose 23.93% to $3.4 million. NFT sales on Polygon increased by 63% in 24 hours to USD 1.7 million.
In NFT collections, Ethereum-based Otherdeed led the sales volume with a 248% increase to USD 2.5 million. Otherdeed NFTs represent the virtual plots of land in the Otherside metaverse, with 32,752 owners.
Mocaverse, the membership NFTs collection from Web 3.0 venture capital and game developer Animoca Brands, had the second highest sales volume at US$1.7 million.
The NFT collection of Alien Worlds, a play-and-earn NFT game running on Ethereum, has the most owners, with 4.51 million, followed by play-to-earn staple Axie Infinity with 2.03 million.
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