Crypto back on the move

Traders Sunday night fixated on Bitcoin's weekly close. Would it stay above $26,500, possibly triggering a swift-moving leg up? Indeed, it did. BTC surged to $27,200 as of early Monday morning.

More potential catalysts loom right around the corner. The U.S. Federal Reserve meets Wednesday. With most forecasters anticipating a pause in rate hikes, equity index futures were drifting higher as of 7:50 a.m. (EST).

The total crypto market is $1.12 trillion on a 1.6% gain in the past 24 hours.

As far as noteworthy gainers among Top 100 digital assets, per CoinGecko, there's no denying Toncoin's momentum right now. TON stormed into the Big Ten on a 32% weekly gain as of Sunday afternoon.

The asset is tied to The Open Network, a blockchain originally developed by Telegram, that hived off but recently realigned with the Telegram platform, and is now seen as possibly being on the cusp of being able to give users a Web3-like communal experience undergirded by crypto.

Over the past month, TON has nearly doubled from $1.25 to $2.43, according to CoinGecko.

A look at the Top 30 coins reveals most of them either in the green, flat or only slightly down. Stellar singularly sticks out as a relative dud. Stellar's native XLM, 24th-largest coin, has declined 6% to $0.1183 over the past seven days as of Monday morning at 7:55 a.m. (EST).

Earlier this month, Stellar created a bit of a stir with a cryptic announcement about something cool coming. It turned out to be a marketing campaign featuring actor Idris Elba. Traders sold the news.

Meanwhile, crypto sleuths were captivated this weekend following a brazen heist that involved a hot wallet belonging to Mark Cuban. The billionaire NBA franchise owner/entrepreneur confirmed the incident did happen and that it involved assets he stored on MetaMask. Roughly $900,000 worth of digital assets, including Lido Staked Ether (stETH), are said to have been stolen (Cointelegraph). The almost weirdly transparent nature of the digital money realm was on full display. Independent blockchain investigator Wazz first spotted suspicious behavior in a Cuban wallet that had been dormant for five months. Cuban confirmed the suspicions and he also confirmed some of the outflow transfers in fact were made by him, as he closed out of the vulnerable wallet.

Online onlookers continue to debate how it could have happened (for example, whether Cuban mistakenly signed off on a malicious transaction); but it would seem more likely his private key was compromised, given, Cointelegraph explained, that the funds were directly transferred out of the wallet.

Parabolic advance anyone? Bitcoin broke free from an ascending triangle formation (on the low timeframe) and is likely bound for $28,000, said Credible Crypto, a strategist followed by nearly 350,000 users on X.

The Daily Hodl pointed out the analyst's concession that BTC, of course, could experience a corrective move after this latest surge.

On the other hand, “this is probably going to be the start of a much larger move to the upside," Credible Crypto said.

How much larger? BTC could potentially advance by as much as $10,000, within a couple of weeks. A breakthrough of $28,000 would confirm such an upswing could be in the cards.

Here's a rose-colored but not overly outlandish scenario: the Fed signals that peak rates have been reached, setting off an explosive rally.

However, more than a few experts have said there's no way the Fed does that. Economic growth seems solid and inflation, while lower, is still above the 2% level that the central bank has publicly coveted.