Bitcoin and Ether rose during Monday afternoon trading hours in Hong Kong, while most of the top 10 non-stable cryptocurrencies by market capitalization declined. Risk appetite remained low after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Binance and Coinbase two weeks ago.
See related article: Weekly Market Wrap: Crypto lawsuit, Hinman and a rare break in rate hikes
Bitcoin, Ether Gain, Fall of Most Top 10 Cryptos
Bitcoin was up 0.5% from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Hong Kong to hit US$26,442. Ether gained 0.46% over the same period to US$1,724.
Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, surged above US$26,000 on Saturday to hit a seven-day high of US$26,769 after dropping to a three-month low late last week.
Investor appetite for crypto remains cautious since the SEC filed a lawsuit against Binance and Coinbase two weeks ago.
“Perhaps this recent behavior will lead to a restructuring of the SEC with a new head,” Mike Brusov, co-founder of crypto intelligence firm Cindicator, wrote in a statement shared with Forkast.
“New leadership would then usher in positive changes for crypto regulation and represent a major step forward in the development of the crypto industry. The new administration would confidently spark new innovations and help expand the crypto space in the United States.
New York-based crypto exchange Bakkt has suspended trading in Polygon, Solana and Cardano tokens and plans to delist them, according to Fortune on Friday. Trading platforms such as Robinhood and eToro also decided to delist several cryptocurrencies following SEC lawsuits.
Cardano’s ADA token was the biggest loser of the day in the top 10, falling 2.36% in the past 24 hours to US$0.2601, followed by Polygon’s Matic token which lost 1.62 % to US$0.5983.
The XRP token recorded the largest gain, rising 0.95% to $0.4884. The token has seen some upward momentum since last week after internal SEC documents were released showing former director William Hinman claiming that Ether was not a security. Investors hope this would prove that XRP was unfairly targeted by the regulator, in the SEC v. XRP lawsuit.
Total crypto market capitalization in the past 24 hours fell 0.33% to US$1.07 trillion and market volume decreased 1.2% to US$19.92 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.