Bitcoin price falls below US$19,000, XRP gains on SEC lawsuit developments, Ether post-Merge slide continues

Bit­coin fell below the US$19,000 resis­tance lev­el for the sec­ond time in a week in ear­ly Wednes­day trad­ing in Asia. Ether and most oth­er tokens in the cryp­tocur­ren­cy top 10 by mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion lost ground. XRP was the excep­tion, gain­ing on news the token’s issuer, Rip­ple Labs Inc, and the U.S. Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion (SEC) are seek­ing a sum­ma­ry judg­ment to end their pro­tract­ed lawsuit.

See relat­ed arti­cle: Ethereum says Merge upgrade suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed, more to come

Fast facts

• Bit­coin fell 3.3% in the past 24 hours to trade at US$18,886 at 8 a.m. in Hong Kong, while Ether lost 3.9% to US$1,323 accord­ing to Coin­Mar­ket­Cap. Solana saw sim­i­lar loss­es, drop­ping 3.8% to US$31.42. Doge­coin was lit­tle changed, dip­ping 0.3% to US$0.058.
• Ether has fall­en 16% in the sev­en days since the much-antic­i­pat­ed “Merge” to a proof-of-stake net­work on Sept. 14. Ethereum Clas­sic, the net­work from which Ethereum is forked, fell 4.9% to US$29.13, bring­ing its loss­es since the Merge to 17.5%.
• XRP was the sole gain­er in CoinMarketCap’s top 10, gain­ing 7.4% to US$0.41. The token reached its high­est price since late May overnight at US$0.4215 on reports Rip­ple and the SEC are seek­ing a sum­ma­ry judg­ment to end a law­suit that began in Decem­ber 2020 with­out going to tri­al. In the law­suit, the SEC alleged the sale of XRP con­sti­tut­ed an offer­ing of unreg­is­tered secu­ri­ties worth over US$1.38 billion.
• U.S. equi­ties end­ed Tues­day trad­ing low­er. The Dow Jones Indus­tri­al Aver­age and the Nas­daq Com­pos­ite Index fell 1%, while the S&P 500 Index lost 1.1%.
• The U.S. Fed­er­al Reserve began its two-day Fed­er­al Open Mar­ket Com­mit­tee (FOMC) meet­ing on Tues­day where it is expect­ed to raise inter­est rates by a fur­ther 75 basis points to curb inflation.
• Fed Chair Jerome Pow­ell has repeat­ed­ly said despite the risk of high­er unem­ploy­ment and weak­er eco­nom­ic growth, he will con­tin­ue to raise inter­est rates until infla­tion falls back to a tar­get lev­el of 2% from the cur­rent rate of more than 8%. “These are the unfor­tu­nate costs of reduc­ing infla­tion,” he said at the Fed’s annu­al sym­po­sium last month. “But a fail­ure to restore price sta­bil­i­ty would mean far greater pain.”

See relat­ed arti­cle: SEC, Rip­ple seek sum­ma­ry judg­ment in attempt to speed up XRP lawsuit