Digital-asset prices are moving higher Thursday, looking to regain some of Wednesday’s losses, which saw most major coins post double-digit declines.
After a frantic session that saw bitcoin threaten to make a new 2018 nadir, the No. 1 digital currency is gaining modest ground, with a single bitcoin
BTCUSD, +1.25%
changing hands at $6,469.69, up 2.4% since Wednesday at 5 p.m. Eastern time on the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange.
As pundits sought to explain Wednesday’s decline, Element Digital Asset Management said the lack of pricing information in the cryptocurrency market leaves coins susceptible to significant price swings driven by single entities, often referred to as bitcoin whales.
“Unlike other mature asset classes that have very metrics based fair value models that tend not deviate much from one another, the concept of fair value with bitcoin can have a huge variance,” wrote Element’s portfolio director, Thejas Nalval, and Kevin Lu, the firm’s director of quantitative research.
“How large market participants that are organic in the supply chain interpret news events such as yesterday is more likely to drive short term price action than any single person or entity preaching technical levels or evangelizing the value of bitcoin using theoretical models.”
Read: SEC delay on cryptocurrency ETF is more a speed bump than a red flag, market insiders say
Ripple clawing back some losses
Altcoins, or digital coins other than bitcoin, are chipping away at yesterday’s losses. Ether
ETHUSD, +1.45%
has regained 1.4% to $362.73, Bitcoin Cash
BCHUSD, +1.42%
is trading higher by 2.4% at $605.60, Litecoin
LTCUSD, +1.75%
is up 1% at $63.43 and Ripple’s XRP
XRPUSD, +0.13%
after plummeting more than 15% Wednesday, has regained some ground, trading up 2.2% at 34 cents.
After a session to forget on Wednesday, futures got back on track Thursday. The Cboe Global Markets Inc.’s August contract
XBTQ8, +1.66%
finished the day up 2.7% at $6,477.50 and the CME Group Inc.’s August contract
BTCQ8, +1.93%
finished Thursday up 2.1% at $6,460.
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Source : MTV
