Bitcoin it started trading at the $22,000 level and fell to $21,000 before the release of the US CPI data. After the release, most cryptocurrencies rallied. Bitcoin reached its highest peak since August on Thursday. BTC traded at the US$25,250 level.
However, BTC was unable to sustain the gains and fell back to the $23,000 level after the release of the higher-than-expected PPI data, raising concerns among investors and traders about inflation. .
Whenever there is a fear of inflation, BTC falls because it doesn't like it. Investors run out of funds to spend when interest rates rise. Therefore, BTC falls. Despite the drop, BTC is up more than 72% from its cycle low point in January.
Compared to BTC's all-time high, it is almost 65% below. However, on Saturday BTC rallied to the $24,600 level. If the move continues, we could see it hit $25,000 again next week.
second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, also traded online against BTC this week. Ethereum broke above the $1700 level on Thursday and fell to $1600 after the release of the PPI data. On Saturday, ETH is again trying to try and break above the $1700 level by trading very close to it. Ethereum has gained more than 86% since its low point of $893 in June of last year. However, it is down 66% from its all-time high of US$4,899 in October 2021. There is also a drop in ETH available ahead of Shanghai availability on exchanges.
On the other hand, XRP also rallied due to the ongoing lawsuit between the SEC and Ripple, and although it could not last there, the rally soon died down. Polygon outperformed BTC on Friday, and ETH gained a decent amount ahead of the launch of the Zero Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine, or zkEVM. In an interesting turn of events, the launch of Ordinals, Bitcoin itself NFTs collection, has increased its popularity. It allows users to transfer and receive individual Satoshis. A Glassnode report noted that Ordinals NFTs had contributed to a short-term improvement in usage of the Bitcoin network, bringing many new active users with non-zero addresses to the network.
The German tech giant siemens is the latest player in the digital securities space, following the issuance of a $65 million bond with a one-year maturity on the Polygon blockchain.
In terms of price action, among the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap, here are the best and worst performing cryptocurrencies over the past week:
top 5 crypto winners during the week:
1. Filecoin increased by 50%
2. The Internet computer increased by 43%
3. Astar increased by 37%
4. Claytn increased by 36%
5. Flow increased by 36%
top 5 crypto losers this week:
1. PAX Gold is down 0.39%
2. The USD coin is down 0.02%
3. ONE BUT LEO has dropped 0.33%
4. Tether is down 0.01%
(The author, Edul Patel, is CEO and co-founder of Mudrex, a global crypto investment platform.)
