The market continued to rally this morning, with the MVIS Digital Assets 100 Price Index, a market cap-weighted index tracking the performance of the top 100 cryptocurrencies, up over 4 percent since yesterday. The bullish move saw the cryptocurrency ecosystem’s market cap surge past $370 billion.
The top ten coins are all seeing significant price increases, with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) being up over 18 percent and Ripple’s XRP token up 21 percent. BCH is now trading above $1,000, and is entering a hard fork that will introduce Ethereum-like features and increase its block size up to 32MB, allowing for faster transactions and higher volume. $834,654,000 USD worth of BCH was traded over the last 24 hours.
XRP is doing even better volume-wise, with a huge 24-hour trading volume of $1.8 billion. XRP is trading, at press time, at $0.87 per token. Cryptoglobe reported two days ago in our XRP price analysis that the strong resistance line at $0.70 was being tested repeatedly and was due for a powerful breakout.
The project’s many new partnerships have likely influenced the impressive 20 percent jump – Ripple, the company behind it, has partnered with Santander, and the bank has even launched a Ripple wallet signifying the first major collaboration between a cryptocurrency and a traditional bank. SBI Holdings and LianLian International are also among Ripple’s new partners.
Today’s increase is the culmination of a gradual two week rally that looks to be more sustainable than the short-lived bounce seen in February, the last time the market saw such an upward trend. Bitcoin is trading above $8,000 with the $9,000 mark within reach. On the fundamental side, no negative news has put a damper on market growth recently. EU authorities are taking steps to regulate crypto exchanges, a move that’s being seen as a step towards legitimizing cryptocurrencies as a whole.
The combination of positive news and adoptive measures seen over the last few weeks could well be behind the rally that has seen the top 25 coins all increase in value over the last 24 hours. The upward trend raises the question of whether the bear market in effect since last December could finally be coming to an end.
