Bulls on parade
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. 9th May 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
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Memecoins Spike
On a green, green day, with Bitcoin racing well past the $100K mark, it was Ethereum that ran off with the show, soaring by 20% in 24 hours to hit above $2,300 in the wake of a successfully completed upgrade. For sheer weekend-partying-starts-now explosiveness, look no further than the No. 30 token PEPE, a frog-based cartoon image that turned into a community and which has come to symbolize memecoin audacity. All of this momentum kicked in yesterday. Macro conditions broke just the right way. BTC did the initial heavy lifting, cranking up to $103K amidst growing optimism on the trade war front. Also added into the bullish equation: positive crypto fund flows plus a nagging sense that interest rates might get slashed sooner rather than later. Earlier this morning, BTC shot to as high as $103,890. ETH followed along excitedly like a penned-in pooch reunited with its liberty. "Altcoin momentum is building," CoinDesk said.
Naturally, as big-cap coins reasserted their propensity to leap lizard-like, Dogecoin took the hint, reaching the 20-cent mark on a gain of 13% in 24 hours. Solana gained 11% in that span. XRP is up 8%. Total crypto assets hit $3.38 trillion, up 3.8% since yesterday at this time, according to CoinGecko.
What's down
Executive Learns Fraud Still Illegal
Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky, who had already pleaded guilty to securities fraud, was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Once a dominant crypto lender, Celsius froze withdrawals and transfers in the wake of the Terra ecosystem collapse back in the spring of 2022. Within a few weeks, in July of '22, Celsius filed for bankruptcy.
In a statement yesterday, Jay Clayton, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said: “Mashinsky targeted retail investors with promises that he would keep their digital assets safer than a bank, when in fact he used those assets to place risky bets and to line his own pockets."
Ultimately, Clayton added, "Mashinsky made tens of millions of dollars while his customers lost billions."
What's next
The Upgrade Everyone Was Waiting For
With Bitcoin blowing past a psychologically important barrier and traders seeing telltales of the beginning of the end of the trade war, could it really be a time for altcoins to shine?
Crushing ambiguity tied to Trump's hardcore tariff policy has kept risk assets in check. Animal spirits spent April cowering.
Yesterday, President Donald Trump announced a trade deal with the UK. It's his first deal since unleashing his market-roiling trade war. That the deal clearly was done for show didn't seem to matter. "Markets welcomed the prospect of easing trade tensions," Decrypt said.
So the mere televised sight of Trump signing a broadly outlined framework of a still-to-be-ironed-out trade deal with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer sent the market on an upward climb, with BTC returning above $100,000. Ethereum then reclaimed $2,000, soaring to $2,400 for the first time in two months.
According to Decrypt, citing CoinGecko data, the big winners today (PEPE, VIRTUAL, UNI) are Ethereum-based coins. ETH itself, second-largest crypto and a kind of standard-bearer for all coins that are not BTC, spiked by as much as about 30% amidst wider momentum. But ETH's rally also erupted in the wake of the Pectra upgrade, completed without any glitches. The new network changes aim to enhance scalability and boost validator staking limits.
Developers called Pectra the “most ambitious upgrade” that Ethereum has ever implemented (Decrypt).
