By Ethereum has dropped by 19%. This week, XRP went up a lot when news came out that the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple might soon be over.
After hearing that the US Federal Reserve was raising interest rates by another 75 basis points to stop the effects of inflation, Bitcoin and Ethereum prices went down on Wednesday.
When the Fed raised interest rates by 75 basis points for the first time this year in June, many people said it was the biggest increase from the central bank since 1994.
In July, the Fed announced a 0.5% increase. The prices of both Bitcoin and Ethereum went up within an hour of the news. This isn’t how the market usually works because when interest rates go up, it costs more to borrow money, so investors are more likely to sell their riskier assets.
In any case, neither of the top two cryptocurrencies did well this time. According to CoinGecko, Bitcoin fell.53% in the last week and is now worth $19,086. Ethereum fell 7.5% and is now worth $1,328.
This week, a number of other top cryptocurrencies had losses in the double-digit percentage range, including COSMOS, which fell by 12% to $14.39. The price of Ethereum Classic (ETC) fell 15% to $28.74, and the price of Near Protocol (NEAR) fell 10.5% to $3.79.
But some names didn’t get infected and posted gains in the double digits: Stellar (XLM) jumped 16% to $0.1243, Cronos rose 16% to $0.1228, and Algorand (ALGO) jumped 38% to $0.408.
The biggest gain came from XRP, which jumped 44% in a week to $0.5232. The pump happened after it was reported earlier this week that both Ripple and the SEC had filed motions for summary judgement in the $1.3 billion lawsuit, trying to get the case thrown out before it goes to trial.
In December 2020, the SEC took Ripple to court on charges that it sold XRP as an unregistered security.
Even before this week’s inflation news from the Fed, ETH was already going down.
Glassnode data showed that most of the predictions that the merger would be a case of “buy the rumour, sell the news” were true. “It’s not a big surprise that profits were made where they could be made,” Glassnode wrote in its merger on Monday. “Funding rates have since gone back to neutral from a record low of -1,200% before the merger,” which suggests that most of the short-term speculation premium has gone away.
In August, Glassnode said that there was a huge demand to buy call options for ETH at a higher price. They called this a “state of extreme bullish bias” for the price of the asset in September. But the same report said that ETH’s implied volatility was higher for price predictions that went down than for price predictions that went up. This showed that traders “paid a premium for’sell-the-news’ put option protection post-merge.”
Before the merger, people who mined Ethereum made a lot of money. OK Link, which gathers data from a dozen different mining pools like F2Pool, Binance, and BTC.com, says that miners sold a total of 14,785 ETH worth $19.73 million between September 9 and September 15, the day of the merge. On September 14, miners sold almost 8,032 Ethereum, which was the most.
Gensler vs. Ethereum
In a federal lawsuit against a crypto influencer that was filed on Monday, the SEC hinted that it thinks the U.S. government has control over all Ethereum transactions.
According to a sentence in the 69th paragraph of the lawsuit, the SEC says it can sue Ian Ballina not only because his case involves transactions made in the U.S. but also because most of the Ethereum network’s validators are in the U.S., which means the whole blockchain falls under the government’s control, or so the SEC says.
Gensler has said in the past that Bitcoin is a commodity, but many people think that his silence on Ethereum could mean that he thinks of the blockchain as a U.S. securities exchange. Just last week, Gensler said that proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies, which allow holders to passively earn returns through staking, could be considered securities: “From the coin’s point of view, that’s another sign that, under the SEC’s “Howey test,” investors are expecting profits based on the work of others.
MicroStrategy buys more Bitcoins.
Even though Saylor is no longer with the company, MicroStrategy is still bullish on Bitcoin: On Monday, the software company added another 300 BTC to its bank account. At the time, this was worth about $6 million. MicroStrategy was already the biggest corporate HODLer in the world, but with the new Bitcoin, it now has 130,000 Bitcoins, which at the current price is worth about $2.45 billion.
At the start of trading on Monday, the Bitcoin purchase caused MicroStrategy’s stock to drop by 6%. By the next day, however, the stock had gone back up.
