Proactive Investors - More than any other asset class, cryptocurrencies are prone to huge price swings on what would typically be seen as innocuous developments in other markets.
This phenomenon was on full display over the past 24 hours, when the global cryptocurrency market surged close to 6%, bringing combined capitalisation among all cryptoassets well above US$1.25tn.
Bitcoin closed Thursday 3.5% higher at US$31,800, the strongest close since May 2022, in the peaceful days before Terraform Labs tanked the sector.
Bitcoin spot prices pared back around 0.7% in this morning’s Asia trading session, but still remains comfortably above 31k at the time of writing.
Bitcoin (BTC) goes higher, but dominance takes a hit – Source: currency.com
Ethereum (ETH) surged 7% higher, breaching the US$2,000 resistance line for the first time since mid-April. The ETH/USDT pair remains dead-on 2k as of Friday morning.
These daily gains were chump change compared to Ripple (XRP) though.
The blue-chip altcoin added a whopping 65% overnight, sending its market cap above US$41bn, thus flipping Binance’s BNB token for the number four slot.
These meaty gains come off the back of what XRP’s developer Ripple Labs is calling a victory in the long-running dispute with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Clearly, Ripple investors, collectively called the Ripple Army, took well to the news, even though the dispute is far from over.
In fact, Ripple Labs and the SEC are expected to go to trial, so yesterday’s ruling, though hardly bad news for XRP, was hardly an inflection point.
But as is typical in the cryptosphere, the sentiment alone was enough to push XRP to 19-month highs.
XRP entered a correction phase this morning retracing from US$0.93 to US$0.78 as of 9.40am BST.
Other altcoins took part in the bull stampede, with Cardano (ADA) adding 23%, Solana (SOL) adding 33%, Polygon (MATIC) adding 20% and Avalanche (AVAX) adding 18%.
Given these remarkable altcoin gains, bitcoin dominance has fallen below 50%.
In the equities space, Nasdaq-listed Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) took off like a rocket, surging more than 25% to US$107 per share.
Coinbase stands to gain significantly from a positive outcome for Ripple, as it would diminish the SEC’s contention that Coinbase is dealing in unregistered securities.