This article provides a quick overview of how the crypto markets have been doing—with the focus on Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), XRP, EOS, Binance Coin (BNB), and TRON (TRX)—over the past 24-hour period.
To give you a rough idea of how things are going today, every one of the top 50 cryptoassets (by market cap) is currently in the green (against the dollar).
All market data was taken around 07:20 UTC on 1 October 2019 from CryptoCompare, which also generated the price charts shown in this article.
BTC-USD
The bullish mood in the equity markets both in Europe and the U.S., perhaps due to the optimism surrounding US-China trade negotiations, seems to have translated into a greater appetite for more risky asset classes such as crypto (and Bitcoin in particular).
Bitcoin and the altcoins may have also been helped by the announcement from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), made around 22:33 UTC on September 30, that it had settled charges against EOSIO software developer Block.one for conducting the EOS ICO (despite the fact that EOS raised around $4 billion in one year) despite the fact that EOS was an unregistered security, and that had Block.one had settled these charges by agreeing to pay a civil penalty of only $24 million.
The fact that Block.one was able to “get away” with a relatively minor fine ((relative to the amount of money they raised) for breaking U.S. securities laws could be seen as good news for all other crypto projects that have conducted ICOs provided that, like Block.one, they have good legal representation and they are willing to cooperate with the SEC. What is not so clear yet, though, is what happens to those cryptoassets that the SEC considers were (at least) initially securities. For example, now that we know the original ERC-20 based EOS tokens were securities, what does that say about the EOS coins currently in circulation? Are they securities? Does a U.S.-based exchange such as Kraken now need to delist EOS?
Anyway, by 03:15 UTC on October 1, the Bitcoin price had managed to reach $8,507, a level last seen on September 25. At press time, the BTC price is hovering around the $8,400 level, up over 7.63% in the past 24-hour period.
ETH-USD
The Ether (ETH) price went above the $180 level around 01:30 UTC on October 1, somewhere it had not visited since September 24, despite the current problems with Ropsten, Ethereum’s test network for the Istanbul hard fork .
Although Istanbul was supposed to get activated at block height 6,485,846, which was estimated to be mined on October 2, due to faster block confirmation times than usual, the upgrade got triggered around 03:40 UTC on September 30.
Originally expected to activate on Oct. 2 at block height 6,485,846, Istanbul was released two days earlier than planned – on Sept. 30 at roughly 3:40 a.m. UTC. Since not all miners on the Ropsten blockchain had upgraded to the latest version of the software, we ended up with a split blockchain.
Here is Hudson Jameson, Community Manager at Ethereum Foundation, confirming that Ropsten is currently unstable:
Looks like there is an issue with the Ropsten Ethereum testnet after it hit the #Istanbul block. This is what testnets are for! Be aware that Ropsten will be unstable until this all plays out.
— Hudson Jameson (@hudsonjameson) September 30, 2019
XRP-USD
On September 30, Ripple announced that it had launched operations in Iceland in order to increase its European presence and that it had continued its “acquisition streak” with the purchase of crypto trading firm Algrim (the engineers that were working there will now be working for Ripple). Ripple also said that “the new Icelandic team will play an integral role in the ongoing development of Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) product which utilizes XRP for production cross-border payments.”
EOS-USD
Yesterday’s announcement by the SEC regarding Block.one seems to have helped the EOS price to reach $3.103 by 03:00 UTC on October 1. The last time EOS was trading above $3.00 was on September 24.
One consequence of this announcement is that it allows Block.one to focus more of its attention on development of the EOS ecosystem and not worry about future courtroom battles with the SEC.
BNB-USD
At 02:00 UTC on October 1, the BNB price got to $16.00 and kept on climbing higher till it reached $16.19 two hours later. The last time that BNB was trading above $16 was September 26.
There were three interesting bits of Binance-related news yesterday:
- Binance started live beta testing of its P2P or OTC (or C2C in Chinese) trading.
- Binance announced that it will support TRON (TRX) staking from October 1.
- Binance announced the upcoming launch of phase 7 of the Binance Lending platform.
TRX-USD
The TRX price managed to get to $0.01521 by 06:00 UTC on October 1. The last time it was this high was September 24.
Here are some of the more interesting recent pieces of TRON-related news:
- On September 30, TRON Foundation announced that TRC20-USDT is now supported by Binance.
- On October 1, TRON Foundation announced that BitTorrent File System (BTFS) mainnet had officially been launched.
- On October 1, Justin Sun congratulated Binance for becoming TRON’s newest Super Representative (SR) with more than 12 billion votes.
Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com
