This Week in Cash: Bitcoin Ends in the Purple, but Some Alts Survive a Crazy Week

When people talk about crypto’s volatile nature, they’re referring to weeks like this. 

Bitcoin was at one point trading for below $50,000 per coin on Monday after a jobs report sparked fears that the U.S. economy was headed in the wrong direction.

And a phenomenon dubbed the “carry trade”—a well-known trick where traders around the world use a different currency to buy risk assets denominated in dollars—seemed to be coming undone when the Japanese yen started rising against the greenback. 

The surge in the yen’s value, which was caused by the Japanese central bank raising interest rates, spooked investors, who then flogged risk assets.

This, combined with tensions in the Middle East, meant everything was hit—and hard—including Bitcoin. But fast-forward a few days and major coins and tokens were up again (with U.S. stocks) on news that showed that unemployment filings were actually not as bad as expected.

The price of Bitcoin rolling into the weekend was $60,440, according to CoinGecko. That’s a dip over the week of 3%—and given where things started, a marked relief.

Ethereum was knocked harder by the early week volatility. Experts told Decrypt that ETH investors are less loyal to the coin than Bitcoin or Solana, and therefore it’s prone to bigger sell-offs.

Now, the price of Ethereum stands at $2,605 after losing more than 12% of its value over a seven-day period.

Most major altcoins are also down over the week—except for XRP, the seventh-biggest digital coin by market cap. News broke earlier in the week that Ripple, the company whose founders created XRP, had been ordered to pay a $125 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

The ruling—which ends a 2020 lawsuit—was deemed a win because the regulator had asked for a $2 billion penalty. 

XRP surged on the result, but it is up just 2% over the week now, priced at $0.58 after dropping from $0.64. Zooming out over a 30-day period, though, and the coin is up over 30%.

A major gainer over the past week was Sui, which surged on news that crypto asset manager Grayscale was launching a fund for the asset. Created last year by ex-Meta engineers, the coin has surged over 35% in seven days and is now priced at $0.87.