Bitcoin, Ether edge up; Litecoin leads the winners, Matic the losers; US stock futures flat
Bitcoin rallied on Wednesday morning in Asia to hold above the $27,500 mark as hype for Bitcoin-based memecoins that had clogged the network appeared to cool. Ether also rose, while other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies traded mixed. Litecoin led the gainers as high transaction fees on Bitcoin drove users to alternatives, with the Litecoin network logging record highs in daily transactions. Polygon’s Matic led the losers. U.S. stock futures traded flat on concerns about negotiations over the U.S. debt ceiling and ahead of Wednesday’s inflation figures.
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Bitcoin, Ether stabilize after dip
Bitcoin rose 0.60% to $27,754 in the 24 hours to 09:00 a.m. in Hong Kong, according to CoinMarketCap data, but still had a weekly loss of 2.64%.
“Bitcoin prices have been affected by significant congestion and sky-high transaction fees,” Denys Peleshok, head of Asia at London-based financial institution CPT Markets, said in an email. “Such network issues and infrastructure disruptions can limit institutional investors’ confidence in the asset.”
The congestion on the Bitcoin network is attributed to the hype surrounding BRC-20, a token standard introduced on March 9 that enables the minting of fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain. The total market capitalization of BRC-20 tokens has fallen from around $961 million on Monday to $688 million at 9:00 a.m. Wednesday in Hong Kong, according to blockchain data tracker BRC-20.io.
Ether rose 0.49% to $1,852. That’s down 0.44% for the week.
Other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies traded mixed, with Polygon’s Matic leading the losers, falling 2.40% to $0.8782 for a weekly loss of 9.47%.
Litecoin led the gainers, gaining 3.45% to $80.33. However, it is down 8.56% for the week. The Litecoin blockchain has logged record daily transactions this week as high transaction fees on the Bitcoin network drove users to other platforms. Transactions on the Litecoin blockchain topped 525,000 on Monday, more than five times higher than at the beginning of the month, according to blockchain data platform BitInfoCharts.
The total crypto market capitalization increased by 0.46% in the last 24 hours to $1.14 trillion. Total trading volume fell 29.34% to $32.02 billion.
NFTs autumn
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 0.91% to 3,462.33 in the 24 hours to 09:00 in Hong Kong, losing 6.64% for the week.
Azuki, an Ethereum-based NFT collection, saw the biggest sell-off across the market in the last 24 hours, rising 388.12% to $2.47 million to surpass DMarket’s $1.51 million and $880,000 for Bored Ape Yacht Club, according to data from CryptoSlam.
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, said on Tuesday that its NFT marketplace will soon add support for Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions – the Bitcoin blockchain’s iteration of NFTs. The platform currently supports NFTs on BNB Chain, Ethereum and Polygon.
Stock futures flat
US stock futures were flat to slightly higher as of 09:00 in Hong Kong. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures rose 0.06 percent. S&P 500 futures rose 0.10%. And Nasdaq Composite futures rose 0.08%.
The three US indices closed lower on Tuesday on concerns about the US government’s potential default in June. US President Joe Biden met with congressional Republicans on Tuesday to discuss raising the government’s debt ceiling, but made little progress, according to Bloomberg on Wednesday. A new meeting is scheduled for Friday.
The April US consumer price index report on Wednesday will provide an insight into the pace of inflation and give insight into the Federal Reserve’s next move on interest rates after a year-long round of hikes. Economists forecast that the inflation rate rose 5% last April, or the same pace as in March and still well short of the Fed’s 2% target, according to a Wednesday Bloomberg report.
New York Federal Reserve President John Williams said on Tuesday that it was still too early to tell whether the Fed had done so with its rate hikes, adding that there is “a need to keep a restrictive stance in place for quite some time to ensure that” the inflation rate falls to 2%, according to Reuters on Wednesday.
The Fed is due to meet on June 14 to decide interest rates, which are now between 5% and 5.25%, the highest since 2006. The CME FedWatch Tool predicts a 78.8% chance that the Fed will keep interest rates unchanged in June, while the giving a 21.2% chance of another rate hike of 25 basis points, up from 14.3% on Tuesday.
(Updates with the stock section.)
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