Bitcoin and Ether prices dropped in Thursday afternoon trade in Asia, as all other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptos went down. However, Dogecoin was the only token to gain, fuelled by a favorable court ruling for Grayscale Investments in its legal dispute with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Despite the price drop, there is “cautious optimism” among traders, according to Rajagopal Menon, vice president of WazirX, India’s largest crypto exchange by volume. Bitcoin lost 0.65% to US$27,258 in the past 24 hours, but has gained 2.97% on the week.
Ether dropped 0.7% to US$1,705, but posted a weekly gain of 1.84%. The SEC delayed a decision on Ark Investment Management’s ETF application in early August, which could happen again.
The Connecticut-based digital asset management firm filed a lawsuit against the SEC in June 2022 after the rejection of the company’s proposal to convert its GBTC Bitcoin fund into a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). A U.S. appeals court overturned the SEC’s refusal on Tuesday, opening up a potential avenue for approval.
European cryptocurrency investment firm CoinShares said in a blog post that the ruling has “definitely put the SEC on the back foot and dramatically improved chances for the approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF”.
A U.S. district court on Wednesday dismissed charges against a group of five firms, including Uniswap Labs and Andreessen Horowitz, for alleged securities violations on the Uniswap decentralized trading platform. This shows the first steps in clarifying the legal and regulatory environment for decentralized finance applications.
Toncoin, the native token of proof-of-stake blockchain TON, dropped 2.11% to US$1.69 in the past 24 hours, but posted a weekly gain of 18.04%. Menon of WazirX said it is the “current flavour of the season” as it is intrinsically tied to Telegram messaging app which has a ready-made user base.
Dogecoin was the only token to gain in the past 24 hours, rising 1.43% to US$0.0665, bringing its weekly gains to 4.33%. This comes after long-time Dogecoin advocate Elon Musk, the chief of social media platform X (formerly Twitter), received a currency transmitter license from Rhode Island state regulators.
Total global crypto market capitalization dropped 0.67% to US$1.09 trillion, while crypto market volume fell 47.96% to US$28.81 billion in the past 24 hours.
The Forkast 500 NFT index rose 0.41% to 2,203.36 in 24 hours to 6 p.m. in Hong Kong, but is down 3.02% on the week. At the same time, Forkast’s Ethereum and Solana indexes posted gains, while Polygon index dropped. Yehudah Petscher, NFT strategist for Forkast Labs, said that NFTs are having a decent day mostly behind optimistic news from crypto.
The SEC charged Los Angeles-based media company Impact Theory on Monday with offering and selling its “Founder’s Keys” NFTs as unregistered securities. This marked the first direct enforcement action by the regulator against an NFT project.
Total NFT sales volume rose 24.24% to US$14.28 million in the past 24 hours. Total NFT transactions rose 2.55% while the number of NFT buyers increased 2.29% according to CryptoSlam data. Among blockchains, Ethereum topped rankings as its sales volume grew 54.7% to US$8.59 million.
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. Today is a day that shows off the strength of the multi-chain NFT ecosystem, said Petscher. Both new and existing mints are performing well.
