Bitcoin held steady above the $27,600 level on Thursday as ether (ETH) stabilized after a multi-day decline, while XRP and Avalanche’s AVAX jumped.
The largest cryptocurrency by market value is up just over 0.6% over the past 24 hours and appears to be stabilizing above the $27,600 level after losing support at $28,000 earlier this week. Ether fell 0.5%, Solana’s SOL fell 1.4%, while Cardano’s ADA and BNB Chain’s BNB traded flat.
XRP tokens gave back some gains on Wednesday after jumping 5%, following two major developments for payments company Ripple. The company’s Asian arm was granted a Singapore license to offer its payment services to users in the region, while the US entity scored a victory when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lost an appeal attempt in the Ripple case. case.
“It’s great to see Ripple fending off the SEC’s legal action. This further underlines the urgent need for clear and well-defined regulations,” said David Janczewski, CEO of blockchain protection company CoinCover.
“XRP’s rise shows that regulatory clarity is a catalyst for market confidence and will create the responsible growth that policymakers want to see,” Janczewski added.
Ripple has historically kept its distance from XRP, the token that powers some of its products and the XRP Ledger network. But any progress in Ripple’s lawsuits or licensing will clearly have an impact on XRP prices, as traders link the two.
Why AVAX saw a boost?
Avalanche tokens appeared to gain a boost as demand increased after popular accounts on social app X, formerly Twitter, appeared to promote an application built on the blockchain.
Stars Arena as it is called is similar to Friend.Tech, a viral app that allows Ethereum users to buy “shares” of X accounts in exchange for certain privileges. The platform registered more than 600,000 transactions since Monday, DappRadar data shows.
AVAX prices rose as much as 6% on Wednesday before retreating as on-chain data showed showed an increase of almost 40% in transactions since the beginning of this week.
Meanwhile, Ruslan Lienkha, head of markets at YouHodler, told CoinDesk in an email that crypto prices could only see an increase if developers took steps to better meet regulatory expectations.
“Positive internal factors in the crypto space will lead to capital inflows, such as broader adoption, growing institutional interest, more jurisdictions with transparent regulations and better technologies,” Lienkha said.
The trader believed that spot Bitcoin ETFs could also contribute to a rally in the broader crypto market, with prices expected to reach at least $40,000 given current developments.
“As of now, the SEC has fewer arguments to reject spot ETFs, so we expect the first approval of spot BTC ETFs to occur in the fourth quarter or early 2024,” Leinkha said. “In case of calm on the stock indices, the price of BTC will rise to the $35,000-$40,000 zone by the end of the year.”