Bitcoin, Ether mixed; Polygon leads gainers; Equity futures flat as U.S. debt default worries recede

Bit­coin prices rose on Thurs­day morn­ing in Asia, while Ether edged down. The oth­er top 10 non-sta­ble­coin cryp­tocur­ren­cies by mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion gained. Polygon’s Mat­ic led the win­ners after it said trans­ac­tion vol­ume on its zero knowl­edge scal­ing solu­tion hit a record high. U.S. equi­ty futures were lit­tle changed after a sol­id ral­ly in reg­u­lar trad­ing on Wednes­day as progress was report­ed in talks to raise the U.S. debt ceil­ing to avoid a default.

Bitcoin gains with altcoins

Bit­coin rose 1.37% to US$27,404.88 in the 24 hours to 8:00 a.m. in Hong Kong, but lost 0.78% over the last sev­en days accord­ing to Coin­Mar­ket­Cap data. Ether edged down 0.1% to US$1,822.26, while post­ing a 1.10% week­ly loss.

Sta­ble­coin issuer Teth­er said Wednes­day it will use as much as 15% of its net oper­at­ing prof­it to pur­chase Bit­coin from this month. Mean­time, law­mak­ers in the UK said the same day that Bit­coin, Ether and oth­er cryp­tocur­ren­cies should be reg­u­lat­ed as gam­bling rather than as finan­cial services.

The oth­er top 10 non-sta­ble­coin cryp­tocur­ren­cies trad­ed high­er. Polygon’s Mat­ic led gain­ers with a rise of 4.92% to US$0.8875. It record­ed a week­ly gain of 1.16%.

Poly­gon said on Twit­ter Wednes­day that the trans­ac­tion vol­ume on Poly­gon zkEVM — a zero knowl­edge scal­ing solu­tion to the Ethereum Vir­tu­al Machine — hit an all time high of over 13,000 last Sun­day. Poly­gon also said the scal­ing solu­tion saw 70% growth in total val­ue locked last week, its largest week-on-week gain to date.

Lite­coin added 4.49% to US$93.9, extend­ing its week­ly gain of 15.83%. The Bit­coin-like cryp­tocur­ren­cy has seen a surge in recent inter­est due to the con­ges­tion and high­er trans­ac­tion fees on the Bit­coin network. 

The total cryp­to mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion rose 1.04% in the past 24 hours to US$1.14 tril­lion. Total trad­ing vol­ume gained 20.38% to US$34.34 billion.

NFT index gains, Bitcoin Frogs top sales

The index­es are proxy mea­sures of the per­for­mance of the glob­al NFT mar­ket. They are man­aged by Cryp­toSlam, a sis­ter com­pa­ny of Forkast.News under the Forkast.Labs umbrella.

In the non-fun­gi­ble token mar­ket, the Forkast 500 NFT index rose 0.35% to 3,399.91 points in the 24 hours to 9:30 a.m. in Hong Kong – not enough to off­set a decline of 1.28% for the last sev­en days.

24-hour NFT sales on Ethereum, the lead­ing blockchain for NFTs, fell 19.85% to US$15.9 mil­lion. Sales on the Bit­coin blockchain took sec­ond place on Cryp­toslam’s blockchain rank­ing with US$7.7 mil­lion, up 60.91%. 

Bit­coin Frogs, a col­lec­tion of 10,000 frog pro­file-pic­ture NFTs mint­ed on the Bit­coin blockchain, was the top sell­ing NFT col­lec­tion in the last 24 hours. It gained 164.83% to US$2.3 mil­lion in sales.

HV-MTL, anoth­er Ethereum-based NFT col­lec­tion from Bored Ape mak­er Yuga Labs, record­ed the sec­ond high­est sales on Cryp­toslam, surg­ing 75.2% to US$1.2 million. 

NFT sta­ple Bored Ape Yacht Club’s #7830 was sold for US$176,719, record­ing the high­est indi­vid­ual NFT sale.