Bitcoin, Ether Prices Rise, Polygon Leads Top 10 in Gains, Doge, Shib Retreat

Bitcoin and Ether rose in Friday morning trade in Asia along with most of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, excluding stablecoins. Leading memecoins Dogecoin and Shiba Inu were the only ones to fall, while Polygon led gains after Instagram said it would use its network to integrate NFTs into the platform.

See related article: Instagram to allow creators to create and sell NFTs through the platform

Fast facts

• Bitcoin rose 0.25% to $20,209 in the 24 hours to 8 a.m. in Hong Kong, while Ether added 0.8% to $1,531, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

• Polygon’s Matic token rose 9.2% to $0.95 after Instagram’s parent company Meta Platforms Inc. on Thursday said it would run a trial to create and sell NFTs through Instagram using the Polygon blockchain. Meta said it will not charge any fees to display or share NFTs – which it refers to as “digital collectibles” – until 2024, and it will also initially cover the gas fees for transactions on the network.

• Dogecoin and Shiba Inu both fell back after a string of gains on the back of Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of social media platform Twitter Inc. late last week. Musk is known to be a fan of memecoins and has hinted that they could be integrated into Twitter. Dogecoin fell 4% to $0.12, but is still up 59.3% in the last seven days. Shiba Inu fell 0.3% to $0.00001173. It is up 10.2% in the last week.

• BNB rose 3% to $329.70, up 14.9% in the past week. BNB’s recent run started after news that Binance Global Inc., the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange and BNB issuer, had invested $500 million in Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

• US stocks fell on Thursday; The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.5%, the S&P 500 index lost 1.1%, and the Nasdaq Composite Index closed 1.7% lower.

• US investors are awaiting the release of two October data sets on Friday – non-farm payrolls and the unemployment rate – to see if job growth has slowed in response to the Federal Reserve’s campaign to tackle inflation by raising interest rates.

• The Fed raised interest rates by 75 basis points on Wednesday, bringing total interest rates to a 15-year high of 3.75% to 4% from near zero in March. It has indicated that it will continue this policy until inflation returns to a target range of 2% – down from 8.2% in September.

See related article: Binance confirms equity in Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition