Bitcoin (BTC) dipped to a daily low as US Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell all but confirmed interest-rate hikes will begin this month in the US. However, the asset had already bounced back up above US$44k again at the time of writing.
The OG crypto quickly sunk below US$43.5k after Powell’s prepared remarks to the House Financial Services Committee were made public.
“With inflation well above two per cent and a strong labor market, we expect it will be appropriate to raise the target range for the federal funds rate at our meeting later this month,” said the Fed chief.
But some were calling his speech a “non event”…
The real question now remains – what will be the size of the US central bank’s “appropriate” inflation-combatting rate hike this month? Powell wasn’t giving too much away at this stage, but many predictions seem to be leaning towards the lower end of the scale, which would likely represent no more than a 0.25% interest-rate increase.
More pointedly for the crypto market, meanwhile, Powell did also hint that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could emphasise “the need for Congressional action on digital finance including cryptocurrencies”.
“We have this burgeoning industry which has many parts to it and there isn’t in place the kind of regulatory framework that needs to be there,” he added.
The crypto market doesn’t seem to be reacting one way or other to that part of Powell’s speech just yet.
Top 10 overview
With the overall crypto market cap still above US$2 trillion and up 1.3% over the past day, here’s the state of play in the top 10 tokens right now – according to CoinGecko.
Former top three coin Cardano (ADA) is in danger of slipping out of the top 10 if it keeps losing steam and Avalanche (AVAX) keeps up its recent momentum.
Charles Hoskinson’s Ethereum competitor has now been flipped by Solana (SOL) again, and for the first time by Terra (LUNA), which is riding a wave of positive sentiment this week registering a +70% gain over the past seven days at the time of writing.
Is ADA a buy at these levels? That’s a definite… hmm… dunno – speak to your financial adviser. One thing, though, love it or hate it, Cardano is registering well on the TVL (total value locked) metric lately, which does tend to indicate a healthy ecosystem of building DeFi (decentralised finance) projects.
Uppers and downers: 11–100
Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$20.4 billion to about US$967 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time.
DAILY PUMPERS
• THORChain (RUNE), (market cap: US$1.61 billion) +12%
• Convex Finance (CVX), (mc: US$1.1b) +11%
• Fantom (FTM), (mc: US$5.15b) +10%
• Curve DAO (CRV), (mc: US$1.1b) +9%
• Anchor Protocol (ANC), (mc: US$1b) +8%
DAILY SLUMPERS
• Radix (XRD), (market cap: US$1.4 billion) -5%
• Humans.ai (HEART), (mc: US$1.39m) -4.5%
• Algorand (ALGO), (mc: US$5.5b) -4%
• Theta Network (THETA), (mc: US$3.2b) -4%
• Flow (FLOW), (mc: US$2.14b) -3%
Uppers and downers: lower cap
Moving below the crypto unicorns (in some cases well below), here’s just a selection catching our eye…
DAILY PUMPERS
• Impermax (IMX), (market cap: US$12m) +96%
• Frontier (FRONT), (mc: US$52m) +52%
• Geist Finance (GEIST), (mc: US$101m) +50%
• Kujira (KUJI), (mc: US$28m) +45%
• veDAO (WEVE), (mc: US$50m) +35%
DAILY SLUMPERS
• Acet (ACT), (market cap: US$23 million) -23%
• UMA (UMA), (mc: US$584m) -21%
• BTC Standard Hashrate Token (BTCST), (mc: US$133m) -20%
• SpiritSwap (SPIRIT), (mc: US$41m) -19%
• Victoria VR (VR), (mc: US$130m) -18%