Bitcoin Regains $28,000, XRP Reaches New 10-Month High In Crypto Market Rise

Cryptocurrency prices surged on Wednesday, overcoming nervousness from a US regulator complaint against the industry's largest exchange that harbored hopes of easier American oversight.

Bitcoin
BTC
It was up 4% in the past 24 hours to $28,434 as of 4:16 p.m. in New York, according to Messari. The token is up 71% this quarter to a market capitalization of $549 billion.

Ether, which has added 1.5% since yesterday, is trading at $1,807. The second largest cryptocurrency by market value is up 50% this year.

Many investors are closely watching XRP
XRP
which rose 7.4%, briefly hitting 58 cents, its highest level since May, amid hopes that Ripple Labs, the company closely associated with the token, will win its legal battle against the Securities and Exchange Commission. from USA

XRP catches a wave

The SEC sued the San Francisco-based firm in late 2020, alleging that Ripple and two of its executives, Chris Larsen and Brad Garlinghouse, raised more than $1.3 billion through the sale of XRP in an unregistered security offering to investors in the US and around the world. Vibe applications XRP for a money transfer service but did not create the token.

“We expect a decision to be made this year, but it could come at any time, it could be weeks, it could be months. The timing is ultimately up to the judge,” Stacey Ngo, Ripple’s senior director of communications, said in a written comment to Forbes.

The bullish outlook for XRP may also be due in part to the classification of some major crypto assets, such as bitcoin, ether, and litecoin, as commodities in the CFTC's complaint against Binance. Although the agency did not mention XRP, Ripple CTO David Schwartz has previously defended that XRP is a commodity.

“XRP is a raw commodity that is traded in commerce and one XRP is treated as equivalent to any other XRP. That's pretty much the definition of a "commodity," Schwartz said in a January post on Twitter.

The SEC and CFTC have been waging a turf war over the regulation of digital assets. SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has argument that all cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin should be considered securities and therefore be under the supervision of their agency. The CFTC, which regulates commodities, is seen as less demanding and has been given greater authority in pending legislation in the Senate, but the White House, federal agencies and some lawmakers have taken an increasingly hard line against the crypto industry this year.

The cryptocurrency market sits at $1.2 trillion, up 3.3% from Tuesday.