Bitcoin edges up after slump, Ether little-changed, other top 10 tokens mixed

Bitcoin rose in Friday morning trading in Asia, after falling below US$25,000 overnight and overall posting a losing week, a trend mirrored by Ether. The rest of the top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies were mixed after finding little impetus from the U.S. Fed decision in the week to leave interest rates unchanged. Polygon’s Matic token had the biggest decline in the top 10 amid sharp falls in altcoins since the U.S. regulator last week labeled many of them illegally issued financial securities.

Bumpy week

Bitcoin added 2.05% over the last 24 hours to US$25,573.56 at 6:30 a.m. in Hong Kong, but lost 3.83% in the last seven days, according to CoinMarketCap data. The world’s largest cryptocurrency, with a market capitalization of about US$497 billion, slipped to US$24,797.17 at around 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, the lowest since March 16.

Ether traded little changed at US$1,665.73, up a slight 0.78%, but posting a weekly loss of 10.06%.   

Solana led gains among the top 10 tokens by market capitalization, rising 3% to US$14.88, but still down 21.58% for the past seven days. The Solana community on Twitter is throwing around the idea of a hard fork to avoid further scrutiny from U.S. regulators, but such an idea is not being discussed among Solana developers, according to Decrypt. 

Polygon’s Matic was the biggest loser out of the top 10, dropping 4.06% to US$0.5952 to bring the week’s loss to 24.06%.

Most of the top 10 have been on a roller-coaster ride since the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) filed lawsuits against crypto exchanges Binance.US and Coinbase in the week of June 5. The SEC also named dozens of altcoins as financial securities, including Solana, Cardano, Polygon and BNB. 

Those four tokens combined had a market capitalization of US$57.5 billion as of Friday morning in Asia, which is a sharp 26.5% slump from the US$78.27 billion prior to the SEC’s lawsuits.

“Many notable altcoins, such as Matic, were listed as securities in recent SEC lawsuits, so venture capital firms have been selling their altcoin holdings to capture the little liquidity left and lessen the blow to their portfolios,” said Nick Ruck, the chief operating officer of blockchain venture studio ContentFi Lab, in a Telegram message to Forkast.

“Institutions are managing portfolio risk and preparing for a continued downtrend amid less market liquidity and tighter regulations,” he said.

In related moves, U.S.-based trading platform Robinhood delisted Cardano, Polygon and Solana, while the eToro platform halted user purchases of Polygon, Decentraland, Algorand and Dash — which were all named in the SEC’s legal filings.

The crypto market seemed to find little relief in the move this week by the Federal Reserve to pause interest rate increases.

“This pause, or skip seems to be a more tactical move, but the fight against inflation is not over yet,” said Michiel Janssen, trader and analyst at crypto hedge fund AltTab Capital, in an email statement shared with Forkast. 

“For crypto this means in the short term that there is less money flowing into the crypto markets. In the longer run, higher inflation and further problems in the banking sector can be a positive for crypto.”

The total cryptocurrency market cap increased 1.21% to US$1.04 trillion in the last 24 hours, while crypto trading volume fell 18.55% to US$37.82 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.