Bitcoin, Ether prices flat; Dogecoin, SHIB Lead Gains in Crypto Top 10

Bitcoin and Ether were little changed in Wednesday morning trading in Asia along with most of the cryptocurrencies’ top 10 by market capitalization, excluding stablecoins. The world’s two leading memecoins, Dogecoin and the Shiba Inu token were the exceptions, still supported by longtime advocate Elon Musk’s purchase of social media platform Twitter Inc.

See related article: Elon Musk buys Twitter to colonize headspace and send his pet DOGE to the moon

Fast facts

• Bitcoin fell 0.1% to $20,485 in the 24 hours to 8 a.m. in Hong Kong, while Ether rose 0.4% to $1,579, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Polygon and Polkadot were the biggest losers in the top 10. Polygon fell 3.2% to $0.87 and Polkadot fell 2.4% to $6.47.

• Dogecoin continued its price rise after Musk bought Twitter, rising 12.2% to $0.14. It hit $0.15 overnight, its highest price since April. The token has risen 127% in the last seven days. Copycat memecoin Shiba Inu token also traded up 3.2% to $0.00001286, a jump of 25.7% in the past seven days.

• The win comes amid sweeping changes Musk has made since buying the social media platform, including firing the entire board. The world’s richest man too tweeted a picture of a Shiba Inu – the breed of dog the Doge meme is based on – the last few days. Musk has previously hinted at a possible integration of Dogecoin into Twitter as a payment method.

• Bitcoin’s hashrate, the amount of computing power used to maintain the network, hit an all-time high of 288,400 petahashes per second on Nov. 1, according to CoinMetrics. Although this requires a huge amount of electricity, said Jeff Yew, CEO of Australia’s Monochrome Digital Asset Management. Discard that the process also provides an opportunity to help the transition to renewable energy.

• “Because Bitcoin’s mining process is geographically agnostic, it proves to be a great way to economically exploit stranded energy sources that would otherwise go to waste,” Yew said via email. “Bitcoin miners are energy buyers of last resort, the industry thrives by commercializing otherwise useless energy sources to profit from securing the Bitcoin network and helping to preserve our environment.”

• US stocks fell on Tuesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.3%, the S&P 500 fell 0.4%, and the Nasdaq Composite Index closed 0.9% lower.

• Investors await the latest move by the US central bank on interest rates, due to be announced at 14:00 Eastern Time (US) on Wednesday. The consensus is for a new increase of 75 basis points.

• The Fed raised interest rates from near zero in March to today’s 3.25% as inflation hit a near 40-year high of 8.2% in September. The Fed had indicated that it will continue this policy until inflation returns to a target range of 2%.

See related article: What is the real value of joke coins like Dogecoin and SHIB?