Bitcoin Little Changed Around USD 27,000, Ether Treads Water; Solana, XRP gain
Bitcoin traded little changed on Monday morning in Asia to stay above the $27,000 mark. Ether also traded flat, along with most of the other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies. However, Solana and XRP both gained more than 4%. US stocks rose on Friday as a deal was approved to raise the debt ceiling, with the bill signed by US President Joe Biden on Saturday to avoid a government default. US stock futures traded mixed on Monday morning in Asia. Investor focus has shifted to what will be the next move on interest rates from the Federal Reserve when it meets on June 14.
Bitcoin, Ether trading flat; Solana, XRP gain
Bitcoin rose 0.87% over the past 24 hours to $27,309 at 7:00 a.m. in Hong Kong, but is down 2.84% over the past seven days, according to data from CoinMarketCap. The world’s largest cryptocurrency fell to as low as $26,574 on Friday.
Ether traded 0.67% higher in the last 24 hours at $1,904, little changed for the week.
Most other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies trade flat. The exceptions were a 4.69% price jump for Solana, and a 4.19% gain for XRP.
Solana’s move comes just as the non-fungible token (NFT) secondary sale on the Solana network rose 21.62% in the last 24 hours, according to data from CryptoSlam.
XRP is up 12.06% in the past week, gaining momentum after the XRP community reacted to the draft Digital Asset Market Structure Proposal released Friday by Republicans seeking clarity on the regulation of cryptocurrencies as securities or commodities. Pro-XRP attorney Jeremy Hogan tweeted that the discussion draft may be known as an “XRP holder protecting” action.
“Investor sentiment across both digital assets as well as traditional finance appears to be in a holding pattern awaiting further indications from the US Federal Reserve and other central banks on expected interest rate movements in the third quarter of this year,” Nathan Simmons. Chief compliance officer for Hong Kong-based digital asset platform VDX, said late Friday.
The NFT 500 index falls, May transaction volume increases
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 1.58% to 3,281.22 in the 24 hours to 09:30 in Hong Kong, contributing to a weekly loss of 2.38 %.
Discard ETH NFT Composite Index fell 1.17% during the same period, recording a weekly decline of 1.38%.
NFT sales on Ethereum fell 10% in the last 24 hours to USD 23.65 million, but increased 83.97% in the last week. Sales on the Bitcoin network fell 31.9% to $3.82 million, but still registered a weekly increase of 30%.
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Azuki remained the two most sold Ethereum collections. BAYC had the biggest sale in the last 24 hours at US$5.1 million, followed by Azuki’s US$3.4 million and Mutant Ape Yacht Club’s US$1.7 million.
Uncategorized Ordinals – newly popular Bitcoin Ordinals that are not part of an established collection – recorded a 45.24% decline to $1.4 million in sales in the last 24 hours, but seven-day sales increased by 7.85%.
DMarket, a Mythos blockchain-based collection of gaming NFTs, continued to gain momentum with an 18.34% increase in sales to $1.35 million in the last 24 hours.
Notably, the number of NFT transactions reached 8.9 million in May, the largest since February 2022, according to CryptoSlam data.
“Before we get too excited, we need to understand that the NFT landscape is very different from last year,” Yehudah Petscher, NFT strategist at Forkast Labs, the parent company of Forkast.News, wrote in a comment on Sunday.
“Today, we have projects like DMarket’s gameskin on Mythos Chain, which did over 2 million transactions in the last 30 days alone. Yet growth is not measured in sales alone, and the turnaround in May can only indicate that mass adoption is happening right under our noses,” added Petscher to.
Biden signs debt bill; The service sectors in China and Japan expand in May
US stock futures traded mixed from 10:20 in Hong Kong. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures rose 0.02%, while S&P 500 futures fell 0.1%. Nasdaq Futures fell 0.32 percent.
Crude oil prices rose after the OPEC+ group of oil-producing countries decided on Sunday to extend production cuts into next year, which could be an inflationary factor.
On Saturday, US President Joe Biden signed a bill to avoid a default by the state. The bill, passed by the US Senate on Thursday, would suspend the US debt limit until January 1, 2025.
“I just signed a bipartisan budget deal that prevents a first-ever default while reducing the deficit, protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,” Biden tweeted on Saturday.
In Asia, China’s services sector extended its recovery in May, with the Caixin China General Services Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) rising to 57.1 from April’s 56.4.
“Both service supply and demand increased further in May,” Wang Zhe, senior economist at Caixin Insight Group, said in the PMI report. “Service activity continued to pick up after China scrapped its ‘zero-Covid’ policy in December.”
Japan’s services sector also expanded in May, according to surveys by au Jibun Bank. The Japan Services PMI for May came in at 55.9, up from 55.4 in April.
“The Japanese services sector continued its upward trend that began at the end of last year during May, with the latest PMI data pointing to record increases in business activity, new orders and exports,” said Usamah Bhatti, an economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence. said in the report.
“Businesses were boosted by the easing of the few remaining pandemic restrictions and have seen strong increases in demand, particularly from foreign and inbound tourism,” Bhatti added.
(Updates with NFT and stock sections.)
