Bitcoin holds ground amid Binance lawsuit, XRP keeps surging

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Bit­coin rebound­ed in Wednes­day morn­ing trad­ing in Asia after a slide ear­li­er in the week when U.S. reg­u­la­tors filed a law­suit against Binance, the world’s biggest cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchange. All oth­er top 10 non-sta­ble­coin cryp­tocur­ren­cies gained ground. XRP con­tin­ued to lead the win­ners, while Car­dano fol­lowed. U.S. equi­ties moved low­er on Tues­day on broad­er wor­ries about inter­est rates and the econ­o­my and as reg­u­la­tors pro­posed stricter rules on the U.S. bank­ing industry.

See relat­ed arti­cle: Asia leads cryp­to reg­u­la­tions, inno­va­tion may leave the US, says Ripple’s Long

Fast facts

  • Bit­coin edged up 1.29% to US$27,290 in the 24 hours to 9:00 a.m. in Hong Kong, post­ing a week­ly loss of 2.76%, accord­ing to Coin­Mar­ket­Cap data. The lead­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cy see-sawed so far this week after the Com­mod­i­ty Futures Trad­ing Commission’s (CFTC) filed a law­suit against Binance for alleged vio­la­tion of trad­ing rules. Bit­coin dropped from around US$28,000 to a low of US$26,677 on Tues­day, and bounced back above the US$27,000 mark ear­ly Wednesday.
  • Ethereum also regained ground, ris­ing 4.09% to US$1,776, but still down 0.78% for the past sev­en days. 
  • XRP con­tin­ued to lead the win­ners, jump­ing 10.04% to US$0.5215 for a rise of 12.92% over the sev­en days. The token con­tin­ues to gain on expec­ta­tions that Rip­ple Labs, whose cryp­to pay­ment net­work is pow­ered by XRP, may win a favor­able rul­ing in a law­suit filed against the com­pa­ny by the U.S. Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion. The SEC charged Rip­ple with sell­ing an unreg­is­tered secu­ri­ty in the form of XRP.
  • “The impli­ca­tions for the case are very broad-reach­ing for the cryp­to indus­try because we expect that this deci­sion will ulti­mate­ly set a prece­dent for how the U.S. gov­ern­ment will look at cat­e­go­riz­ing cryp­to assets and reg­u­lat­ing them,” Rip­ple Labs Pres­i­dent Mon­i­ca Long told Forkast.News on Tuesday.
  • Car­dano post­ed the sec­ond largest gain among the top 10 non-sta­ble­coin cryp­tocur­ren­cies, jump­ing 6.68% to US$0.3678, but is still down 1.06% for the week.
  • Adding to reg­u­la­to­ry ten­sions, a U.S. judge ordered a hold on Binance’s US$1.3 bil­lion acqui­si­tion of bank­rupt cryp­to lender Voy­ager Dig­i­tal, as request­ed by the Depart­ment of Jus­tice that appealed an ear­li­er court rul­ing to approve the sale.
  • The total cryp­to mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion rose 1.80% in the past 24 hours to US$1.15 tril­lion. Total trad­ing vol­ume over the last 24 hours dropped 6.00% to US$39.94 billion.
  • In the non-fun­gi­ble token (NFT) mar­ket, the Forkast 500 NFT index dropped 0.34% in the past 24 hours to 4,006.47 as of 09:00 a.m. in Hong Kong, mov­ing down 3.26% for the week. The index is a proxy mea­sure of the per­for­mance of the glob­al NFT mar­ket and includes 500 eli­gi­ble smart con­tracts on any giv­en day. It is man­aged by Forkast sis­ter com­pa­ny, Cryp­toSlam
  • U.S. equi­ties closed low­er on Tues­day. The Dow Jones Indus­tri­al Aver­age dipped 0.12%, the S&P 500 edged down 0.16%, and the Nas­daq Com­pos­ite Index dropped 0.45%. 
  • The U.S. Con­gress held a hear­ing Tues­day on recent bank fail­ures where reg­u­la­tors assured deposits in U.S. banks were safe, but said tighter reg­u­la­tions are required on the bank­ing indus­try. U.S. Pres­i­dent Joe Biden said on Tues­day he was con­fi­dent the prob­lems in the bank­ing sys­tem were being resolved, but his admin­is­tra­tion would offer addi­tion­al sup­port as needed.
  • The U.S. con­sumer con­fi­dence index rose slight­ly in March, the Con­fer­ence Board report­ed on Tues­day, sug­gest­ing more opti­mism in the econ­o­my than thought as the expec­ta­tion was for a decline.
  • On infla­tion, ana­lysts at the CME Group expect a 57.5% chance the Fed will keep rates between 4.75% to 5% at its next meet­ing on May 3. The chance of anoth­er 25 basis-point hike is at 42.5%, up from 41.7% on Tuesday.
  • U.S. stock futures moved up as of 9:00 a.m. in Hong Kong. Dow Jones Indus­tri­al Aver­age futures edged 0.27% high­er, S&P 500 futures rose 0.34% and the Nas­daq Com­pos­ite Index gained 0.36%. Investors are now wait­ing for the data about U.S. pend­ing home sales in Feb­ru­ary, where experts expect a 3% decline from the pre­vi­ous month, accord­ing to CNBC on Tuesday.

See relat­ed arti­cle: Bankman-Fried charged with pay­ing mil­lions in bribes to Chi­nese gov­ern­ment officials

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