Bitcoin and Ether rose in Friday morning trading 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 the network to integrate NFTs into its platform.

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

Fast facts

  • Bitcoin rose 0.25% to US$20,209 in the 24 hours to 8 a.m. in Hong Kong, while Ether gained 0.8% to US$1,531, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
  • Polygon’s Matic token rose 9.2% to US$0.95 after Instagram’s parent company Meta Platforms Inc. on Thursday said it would run a trial to mint and sell NFTs through Instagram using the Polygon blockchain. Meta said it will not charge any fees for displaying or sharing NFTs — which it refers to as “digital collectibles” — until 2024, and it will also initially cover the gas fees for transacting on the network.
  • Dogecoin and Shiba Inu both fell back after a run of gains on the back of Elon Musk’s US$44 billion purchase of social media platform Twitter Inc. late last week. Musk is known to be a fan of memecoins and has hinted they could be integrated into Twitter. Dogecoin fell 4% to US$0.12, but is still up 59.3% for the past seven days. Shiba Inu fell 0.3% to US$0.00001173. It’s up 10.2% over the past week.
  • BNB rose 3% to US$329.70, a gain of 14.9% for the past week. BNB’s recent run kicked off following news that Binance Global Inc., the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange and the BNB issuer, had invested US$500 million in Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
  • U.S. equities fell on Thursday; the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.5%, the S&P 500 Index lost 1.1%, and the Nasdaq Composite Index closed 1.7% lower.
  • U.S. investors are awaiting the release of two data sets for October 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 through raising interest rates.
  • The Fed lifted interest rates by 75 basis points on Wednesday, bringing the total rate to a 15-year high of 3.75% to 4% from near zero in March. It has indicated it will continue this policy until inflation returns to a target range of 2% — down from the 8.2% it was sitting at in September. 

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

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