Crypto markets continued their recovery streak in Tuesday evening trade in Asia with Bitcoin rising over 4% in the past 24 hours to be the second-highest gainer among the top 10 tokens by market capitalization, only behind XRP. Despite a 4.3% recovery, Ethereum was still down over 20% over the past seven days in the wake of “The Merge” last Thursday.
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Fast facts
- Bitcoin rose 4.8% in the past 24 hours to trade at US$19,364 at 4:30 p.m. Hong Kong time, while Ethereum gained 4.4% to trade at US$1,360, according to CoinMarketCap.
- In contrast to other major tokens which were trading lower over the past seven days, XRP was up 8.9% at US$0.379, bringing its weekly gain at 6.2% as the SEC and Ripple seek an early conclusion to a 21-month lawsuit.
- Dogecoin, the market’s biggest “memecoin,” reentered the top ten tokens by market capitalization, overtaking Polkadot, which slid 17.4% this week. As a result of the Ethereum merge, Dogecoin is now the second largest crypto operating on a proof-of -work protocol, after Bitcoin.
- Stocks in Shanghai and Hong Kong closed up 0.2% and 1.3%, while the Nikkei 225 index was up 0.4%, following gains in U.S. markets ahead of the Federal Reserve’s planned announcement of interest rates for this Wednesday.
- The ICE U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the currency against a basket of its biggest trading partners, softened slightly over the past five days, according to MarketWatch. However, the index has grown over 14% year-to-date, on track for its largest increase in 38 years since the index’s inception.
- The price of the U.S. dollar can affect cryptocurrency markets, according to chief operating officer and cofounder of CoinGecko, Bobby Ong. “With a stronger U.S. dollar, investors are more willing to hold or convert their riskier assets back into the U.S. dollar, or its equivalent in stablecoins – giving rise to an inverse relationship between the dollar and cryptocurrency markets,” he told Forkast in an email.
See related article: Markets: Bitcoin back above US$19,000 while Ether posts strongest gains since post-Merge