Bitcoin keeps banging on

Amidst robust fund flows and weakening sell pressure, Bitcoin made a run at $99K on Saturday and again yesterday. As of Sunday afternoon, the largest crypto was sitting at roughly $98.3K, reflecting a 4.9% gain over the prior seven days. On Friday, BTC ETFs recorded inflows of about $900 million, teeing up some positive energy heading into the weekend. By Sunday night, BTC was closing in on $98.5K. Indeed, as of mid-morning today, BTC had flung itself back into six-figure territory.

Meanwhile, MOVE, native token of the Ethereum layer-2 chain Movement, recorded a 14% gain in 24 hours as of Sunday night. MOVE hit $1.13. It's all-time high of $1.45 came on Dec. 10 around the time of its mainnet launch.

When Bitcoin gets transferred out of storage and on to exchanges in large amounts it often spells an increase in sell pressure. The past few months have seen fairly sizable exchange inflows but the trend seems to be slowing.

Back on November 25, about three weeks after the U.S. presidential election, exchange inflows hit a peak of nearly 99,000 BTC. That followed approximately two months of heightened exchange inflow activity, Cointelegraph said. 

According to data from CryptoQuant, BTC exchange inflows noticeably declined in December, as the total number of coins sent to exchanges never rose above 79,000 per day.

Miner outflows have been declining too. CryptoQuant data shows outflows peaked on Nov. 11. On that day, miners sent 25,367 BTC to exchanges with the spot price nearing $88K. On Friday, miners sent just 2,133 BTC to exchanges.

Among Top 30 coins, as of Sunday night, the top weekly performer was payment network Stellar's native asset, the Lumen (XLM), which notched a 28.6% return since last Sunday. XLM, 18th-largest coin, usually moves in tandem with a kindred digital asset, XRP. 

XRP, a coin associated with ledger technology company Ripple, has pulled back, somewhat, at least relative to early last month.

The recent high for XRP is $2.82. It was reached Dec. 3. As of Sunday, XRP was roughly $2.40. While the third-largest coin is down on the day, it has gained 13.5% over the past week.

Ripple's CEO Brad Garlinghouse has confirmed the San Francisco-based company is in the midst of an engineer hiring binge now that the SEC is poised to be led by someone not named Gary Gensler.

Meanwhile, Ripple on Friday continued on a minting spree with the release of 600,000 Ripple USD (RLUSD) tokens, bringing the total amount of the dollar-pegged stablecoins to 72 million (for a market capitalization of $72 million).

At some point later this month, Ripple, which boasts of RLUSD as being uniquely stable by virtue of it being regulated by the State of New York, is set to release an attestation report revealing the composition of $83 million in backing assets.

Weirdly, RLUSD trading volume went haywire the other day, reaching $600M, a jump of 2,000% in 24 hours. But it seems that surge likely owed in part to a small number of outsized trades on Bullish, a crypto platform backed by Peter Thiel, according to U.Today, citing a social media post from Vet, an XRP validator. CoinGecko at last check showed RLUSD with a much more normal 24-hour trading volume mark in the neighborhood of $30M.

The strange and astonishing albeit momentary spike in RLUSD trading volume could have possibly also owed to some tricky-to-decipher, idiosyncratic activity.

"It's hard to distinguish between what's driven by Ripple products and normal users," Vet said.