Crypto sharply rebounds

Goodness, gracious, great balls of green! Most everything on the board is in positive territory with XRP (+8%) leading the way among Big Ten coins. The sixth-largest digital asset in terms of market capitalization, XRP has even managed to go +1.6% over the week-long period.

Also rallying, as of 8:55 a.m. (EST), are Bitcoin and Ethereum, although they each still remained slightly in the red over the past seven days, a more or less putrid stretch punctuated by macroeconomic angst that turned into a hellacious bear/bull tug-o'-war yesterday.

On Thursday, right after the opening bell, the Dow plummeted by 500 points, but then quickly reversed course, ticked into the green and eventually, by afternoon's end, closed 800 points higher. Bitcoin struggled to hang on to $18,000 in the first part of Thursday but got near $19,900 as Friday dawned.

That's some leisure-suit-reminiscent swinging right there, part relief rally, part boomerang master class.

Halloween spirit is bubbling over but that spooky witches' cauldron is no party prop. A ghoul-lash of inflation and higher interest rates continues to keep markets spellbound.

"Maybe we get this last gasp higher in inflation," Liz Ann Sonders, Charles Schwab's CIO, told CNBC. "And from here, we start to decelerate."

Maybe so, but it can’t hurt to expect the unexpected, which goes for the plus side.

Over this prior weekend, XRP sneakily donned a sweet outfit and boogied uptown past the half-dollar mark, even lingering there, gassed, until Monday night. The rest of the week was spent quietly retreating back toward $0.45. Two days ago, Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, the company with which XRP is closely associated, floated the possibility of an imminent conclusion to Ripple's court battle with the SEC.

"Federal judges work at their own pace,” Garlinghouse told panelists at DC Fintech Week. “Optimistically, we’re talking about three to four months," he added. "Pessimistically, it could be longer than that.”

XRP has rallied over the past month thanks to ever-rampant speculation about a successful resolution to this case, possibly even before year's end (Cointelegraph).

Scuttlebutt on Wall Street (and in hedge fund enclaves like Stamford, Ct.) suggest a begrudging acceptance of crypto's ultimate viability, a kind of "okay, it's here to stay" acceptance level. This has been achieved in part by traders watching Bitcoin stick at $19,000 over these past few months, riding out CPI shockwaves in a manner decidedly not reminiscent of this past June when BTC hit a low of $17,800.

The $19K line held early yesterday – until it didn't. Key inflation data came in hot, S&P-tied short sellers snap-covered their positions in what manifest on the ticker as a violent convulsion. Keeping time with the beating like a peak-of-his-powers Ringo Starr, BTC's tune hit a sour note, plunging to an intraday low of $18,201.00, per Coin Metrics.

By noon on Thursday, BTC, as had much of crypto, rebounded with the stock market. Whether investors’ initial reaction to yesterday's unwelcome inflation news was entirely appropriate or completely overdone will have to play out alongside projections about the direction of the central bank's policy throttle.

While BTC was moving in lockstep with U.S. stocks during yesterday's wildly volatile session, Ethereum was lurching about in a seemingly similar fashion, sinking below $1,200 before recovering to $1,300. Macro forces should hold sway in the short-term as monetary policy directional shifts get gamed out. However, more traders are paying attention to ETH's longer-term pivot to being a deflationary asset.

ETH supply since October 8th has declined by nearly 6,000 tokens worth $7.9 million. More ETH is being destroyed compared to the amount created; it's a dynamic that was predicted to come to pass since its switch from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) via the Merge one month ago (Cointelegraph).

Thank a new crypto, XEN Crypto. XEN started over the weekend with no supply. Users could essentially mint it for free, only needing to pay ETH gas fees. Such activity came to dominate Ethereum transactions, with XEN over seven days contributing to the burning of 4,490 ETH tokens.