Bitcoin
Bitcoin (BTC-USD) ticked up on Monday morning, holding above a key level of $60,000. The world’s largest cryptocurrency was up 2.3% to trade at $62,138 (£45,502).
Bitcoin rallied nearly 40% in October, hitting a fresh record high of $66,975 amid the launch of futures-based bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the US. This was the biggest single-month percentage rally since December 2020, according to data from CoinDesk.
Bitcoin is the world’s first decentralised cryptocurrency and amounts to around 48% of the market with a market cap of $1.18tn.
Investors will be looking towards central bank meetings in the US, UK, and Australia to assess inflation, interest rates and determine policy response.
The two-day Federal Reserve meeting in the US is “widely expected to conclude with policymakers announcing plans to begin tapering the monthly $120bn in asset purchases that have triggered unprecedented risk-taking across all corners of financial markets over the past 18 months,” according to CoinDesk.
Read more: Battle of the blockchains: Binance Smart Chain versus Ethereum
Meanwhile, the Bank of England could press the button on the first of many interest rate hikes expected over the next 12 months.
ByteTree Asset Management’s Charlie Morris told Bloomberg that bitcoin is a “risk-on inflation hedge”. The cryptocurrency’s value appeal mainly attracts buyers when global financial markets see strong demand for growth-sensitive assets.
Watch: What are the risks of investing in cryptocurrency?
Ethereum
Ethereum (ETH-USD), the world’s second largest crypto by market cap, was also up 1.68% and trading at $4,317 on Monday.
Ethereum is a blockchain-based software platform that can be used for sending and receiving value globally via its native cryptocurrency ether (ETH-USD) without any third-party interference.
Ether is the main token of the Ethereum blockchain and acts as the primary “fuel” that powers all activity on it.
Solana
Solana is a public blockchain that is backed by Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of crypto exchange FTX.
Its native token is SOL (SOL1-USD) and it is the fourth biggest crypto by market cap.
Solana also hit new record highs in October — one of the majority of tokens native to layer 1 blockchains that followed bitcoin higher. Layer 1 is the base layer, the main network on which a cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin, runs.
“When bitcoin momentum slows down, layer 1 tokens often perform better than any category,” crypto research firm Delphi Digital wrote in a market report in October. “Layer 1s have been the best-performing tokens since the June bottom — and quite frankly, they boast the highest year-to-date returns, too.”
Solana was up 10% on Monday to trade at $207.
Shiba Inu
Shiba Inu’s (SHIB-USD) market capitalisation has remained above that of rival dogecoin (DOGE-USD), after surging last week to join the ranks of the world’s top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap.
Shiba Inu was up 12% to trade at $0.000072, putting its market cap at about $43.03bn — the seventh largest in the world.
Read more: Non-fungible tokens: What are NFTs and why are they creating such a stir?
Joke token Shiba inu is an ethereum-based alternative to dogecoin, another meme token. A meme coin is a cryptocurrency that is based on a meme or that was created as a joke. Both cryptos feature the Shiba Inu dog breed as their mascots.
The token was founded in August 2020 by someone going by the name Ryoshi, who said the coin was meant to be “an experiment in decentralised spontaneous community building” and could give power back to the “average person”.
Dogecoin
Meme cryptocurrency dogecoin was created by Australian entrepreneur Jackson Palmer and software engineer Billy Markus in 2013.
“Dogecoin was initially designed to be ‘as ridiculous as possible,’ in keeping with its parody theme and to prevent people from actually using it over the long term,” according to CoinDesk.
Dogecoin also ticked up 3.7% to $0.272707 on Monday.
Watch: What is bitcoin?
