Bitcoin was giving back some gains early Thursday after breaking through the $70,000 barrier but Ether was rising and testing its recent highs. The focus is now on whether the Federal Reserve can give the crypto sector another boost.
was down 0.3% over the past 24 hours to $70,958. The largest crypto hit a record high near $74,000 in mid-March amid a surge of interest from new spot exchange-traded funds but its price has dropped since then.
Bitcoin broke past $70,000 this week amid high inflows into spot ETFs holding the token. On Tuesday, spot Bitcoin ETFs received $886.6 million in inflows, according to crypto data firm CoinGlass. That was the most in a day since March and the second-largest amount since the spot ETFs launched at the start of this year.
That was followed by a further $488.1 million worth of inflows on Wednesday, according to CoinGlass data.
Cryptocurrencies, like other risk assets, have been held back by relatively high bond yields as the market scales back expectations for interest-rate cuts from the Federal Reserve. That means all eyes will now be on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ publication of April employment data on Friday. Economists’ consensus estimate is for growth of 180,000 nonfarm payrolls, which would be 5,000 more than in March. A number below that would likely push down bond yields and help Bitcoin move higher.
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—the second-largest crypto—was up 1.0% at $3,847 and is up 25% over the past month.
The Securities and Exchange Commission recently approved critical rule changes to allow spot Ether exchange-traded funds to trade. However, it could still take weeks or months before receiving final permission to launch the products.
“Overall, U.S. crypto regulations appear to be moving toward a direction that is against a Fed coin, against U.S. banks engaging with crypto, against non-compliant stablecoins such as Tether and against a blanket classification of all tokens outside Bitcoin and Ethereum as securities,” wrote Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, who leads a team of analysts at
in a research note.
Smaller cryptos, or altcoins, were mostly in the red, with
falling 0.9% and
dropping 0.9%.
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dropped 1.4%.
Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com
