Bitcoin edged higher in Asia on Monday morning, but remained below the $26,000 resistance level, giving up most of its gains last week following a favorable court ruling on Grayscale’s spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund filing. Ethereum also remained range-bound around $1,650, while the other top ten non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies were trading mixed, with XRP leading the way and Dogecoin falling. U.S. stock futures edged lower on Monday morning as Wall Street ended the week higher as a cooling U.S. labor market eased concerns about further rate hikes.
Bitcoin edged up 0.30% over the past 24 hours to $25,958.25 as of 07:30 a.m. in Hong Kong, down 0.46% for the week, according to CoinMarketCap. The world’s leading cryptocurrency lost grip on the $26,000 support level on Friday and fluctuated around the barrier over the weekend.
Bitcoin briefly hit a weekly high of over $28,000 last Tuesday after a court ruling required the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to review asset management firm Grayscale’s Bitcoin ETF application, but it fell sharply after the SEC postponed all pending ETF applications on Thursday. It quickly gave back all gains.
“While investors may be keeping an eye on Grayscale v. SEC developments, it feels like the recent price action is tied to activity in FTX wallets, raising concerns about a potential sell-off as some (or all) of these assets will be liquidated as fiat Justin d’Anethan, Head of Business Development Asia Pacific at Keyrock, a Belgian cryptocurrency market maker, said.
According to Arkham Intelligence data cited by Blockchain, from August 31 to September 2, the Solana-based cold wallet owned by the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX transferred more than $10 million worth of cryptocurrencies (including LINK, SUSHI, LUNA and YFI) transferred to the Ethereum address reporter Wu Kelin.
Markus Thielen, head of research and strategy at digital asset services platform Matrixport, said in a report published by Matrixport on Monday that the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum were both below their 50-day moving averages of $28,299 and $1,789, signaling bearishness.
According to CoinMarketCap, USDT, the world’s leading stablecoin, has lost $1 billion in market capitalization over the past month and remains trading below 1:1 against the U.S. dollar.
“The decline in (USDT) market capitalization was first tied into Bitcoin on August 8, when $400 million was transferred from USDT to BTC. But then, when Bitcoin prices plummeted around August 18, another $500 million seemed to be Redemption. Liquidity leaving the ecosystem is always negative,” said Thielen.
Ethereum edged up 0.17% to $1,635.19, having lost 1.27% over the past seven days.
Most of the other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies have traded mixed over the past 24 hours, gaining no more than 1%. The exception is XRP, which led the gains with a gain of 1.07% over the past 24 hours to $0.5048, but is still down 3.46% for the week.
Dogecoin led the decline, down 0.62% in the last 24 hours to $0.06315 and remained flat over the seven-day period.
Toncoin, the native token of the Ton network, has surged 23.86% over the past week, driven by the network’s launch of Tact, a new smart contract programming language, on August 22.
TON, which stands for “Open Network,” is a layer 1 blockchain originally developed by messaging service provider Telegram, which exited the project in 2020. TON launched a beta version of its own crypto wallet service, TON Space, on August 10, which has been integrated into the TON Space Telegram app at the start.
John Stefanidis, CEO and co-founder of blockchain infrastructure foundation Balthazar DAO, said: “Telegram has a user base of 700 million, and the platform provides tremendous opportunities for new users to distribute and enter the Toncoin ecosystem.”
The total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies fell 0.09 percent to $1.04 trillion. Trading volume fell 10.77% to $19.78 billion.
U.S. stock futures were mixed, with Dow futures and S&P 500 futures inching lower, while Nasdaq futures edged higher. Wall Street closed mixed at the end of regular trading on Friday, but all three major U.S. stock indexes posted weekly gains as Friday’s labor market data eased concerns about a rate hike. U.S. stocks close on Monday and open on Tuesday, the U.S. unemployment rate rose to 3.8% in August, the highest reading since February 2022, according to the Labor Department on Friday, which could mitigate the concerns about further increases in the U.S. interest rates.
Given the uptick in unemployment rate, moderated job gains and wage growth, as well as an increase in labor force participation, “the U.S. August jobs report increases the probability that the highly data-dependent Fed will not hike again in this cycle,” Mohamed A. El-Erian, an adviser to Germany-based financial services firm Allianz, tweeted on Friday.
Adding to the optimistic outlook of the U.S. central bank’s battle against inflation, Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank President Raphael Bostic said on Thursday that “inflation is conclusively on track toward 2% over a reasonable time frame,” and that the Fed’s monetary policy “is already restrictive enough to get us there.”
The Fed raised its interest rate to between 5.25% and 5.50% in July, the highest level in 22 years. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said following July’s meeting that the central bank will take a “data-dependent” approach when deciding how to reduce the country’s annual inflation below its long-term goal of 2%.
The CME FedWatch Tool predicts a 93% chance the Fed will maintain the current rate at its next meeting on September 20, up from 88% on Friday.
Information to notice in the week ahead includes the S&P’s August U.S. services purchasing manager index (PMI) on Wednesday, as well as a series of Fed official speeches on Thursday.
Meanwhile, China’s Shanghai Composite Index logged its biggest weekly gains in over a month last Friday, as the country ramped up the policy supports for its ailing post-Covid economic recovery, according to Reuters on Monday. China’s economic revival kit includes alleviating home-purchase restrictions in an attempt to stablize its wavering property market, as well as the country’s top banks paving ways for more interest rate cuts.
