Bitcoin and Ether strengthened in Friday afternoon trading in Asia, reversing some of Wednesday’s and Thursday’s sharp losses. All other top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, excluding stablecoins, also increased.
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Fast facts
- Bitcoin gained 4.07% in the past 24 hours to trade at US$17,389 at 4 p.m. in Hong Kong and declined 15.5% for the previous seven days, while Ether rose 7.7% to US$1,277, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
- Polygon led gains among the top 10 cryptos, rising 15.69% to US$1.08, and was the top 10 token least affected by recent market turmoil, dropping 4.36% over the previous seven days. Polygon gained earlier in the week after social media platform Instagram chose the platform to host its NFT integration.
- Solana increased 12.66% to US$17.31. It lost 46.4% over the previous seven days as FTX International’s brokerage arm Alameda Research sold holdings, much of which Solana, this week to stop the run on FTX’s native token FTT.
- Asia equity markets rose following significant gains on Wall Street overnight. The Nikkei 225 gained 2.98% in Tokyo and the Shanghai Composite Index rose 1.69%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index strengthened by 6.65% upon opening and closed Friday 7.74% higher after Chinese authorities announced they will reduce Covid-19 quarantine durations by two days.
- U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) data released on Thursday reported that October inflation rose to 7.7% from September, 0.4% higher than a year earlier, but fell short of the 7.9% that economists predicted and was the smallest monthly increase since January. Some investors see this slowing CPI rate as a sign that the U.S. Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes are finally working.
- Economic woes persisted in the U.K., with preliminary figures released on Friday revealing a 0.2% contraction in GDP growth from the second to third quarter of this year. This contraction potentially signals the beginning of what the Bank of England last week forecasted as the U.K.’s longest recession on record, projecting eight successive quarters of contraction.
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