Crypto revs its engine
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 17th January 2025.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
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What’s up
Majors Hit Their Stride
In a 1-2 punch combo, Bitcoin crossed $100,000 and Ethereum jabbed at $3,500 with both majors in the green heading into Friday morning.
Throwing a gutsy haymaker above its weight was Litecoin, 23rd-largest crypto, up 17% on fresh rounds of ETF speculation and asset flow projections were it somehow to wind up the case that there is an LTC ETF launched in the U.S.
XRP remains ever-so close to its roughly seven-year-old record high (of $3.40) as trading volume ballooned over the past 24 hours. On Coinbase, the XRP/USD trading pair accounted for a full one-fourth of volume, well ahead of the second-most traded pair, BTC/USD (19.7%)
What's down
Pudgy Penguins Looking Trimmer
Bitcoin hurtled above $100K last night and got all the way to about $102.5K only a few hours ago. As of 7 a.m. (EST), BTC was $102.3K, a touch red on the often-fickle hourly chart.
As far as 24-hour losses for Top 100 coins go, we haven’t much to tell beyond the pullback of a pair of a AI-related tokens, AI16Z and VIRTUAL. The latter has shed 8% since this time yesterday. After crossing $5, for an all-time high, on Jan. 2, VIRTUAL has since surrendered nearly one-third of its market value. On that same day, AI16Z hit an ATH of $2.47. Its cap weight, having peaked at close to $3 billion, has since been halved.
Dropping a little weight this week is PENGU, a coin connected with the Pudgy Penguins NFT collection. Since last Friday, PENGU has lost 6% to reach $0.3321, according to CoinGecko. Its market-cap still sits close to $2B, making PENGU the 69th-largest digital asset.
What's next
The Strategic Reserve Road Ahead
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the U.S. Treasury, hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, told the Senate Finance Committee the Fed should do away with any notion of creating a digital version of the dollar. Digital asset commentators welcomed this view, decidedly so. After all, such a central bank-issued stablecoin could represent an encroachment on crypto’s turf, as CoinDesk pointed out.
But the pundits are divided over a separate concept, that of a government-curated Bitcoin Reserve. It doesn’t make sense, given the size of the U.S. economy and the current scope of the dollar, to do anything that could be construed as a step on the path to devaluing the greenback, some have argued, per Cointelegraph.
But not adopting a BTC-heavy strategy could leave the economic superpower lagging behind in a fast-moving makeover of global currency standards away from fiat, deemed as too prone to recklessness.
This past July, staunchly pro-crypto Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Republican from Wyoming, introduced a bill compelling the Treasury to acquire one million BTC over five years. Her "Bitcoin Act of 2024" stalled out on Capitol Hill.
After his inauguration on Monday, Trump potentially could issue an executive order for the government to start stacking satoshis, even symbolically; but more likely is a scenario in which, Cointelegraph said, “carefully positioned pro-crypto lawmakers help Lummis’ bill rise through the ranks.”
