Even a little midweek growth spurt on news that the US Department of Labor’s inflation readings were lower than expected, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) entered the weekend with modest losses over the past seven days.
Bitcoin is down 7.9% and is trading at $26,817. Even the news that the Principality of Liechtenstein will soon accept it because paying for state services does not prevent the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization from posting a bigger loss than Ethereum this week.
Bitcoin should be compete with the rising dollar this week. The cryptocurrency usually has an inverse relationship with the dollar so the latter’s rise over the past two days indicates a pullback in Bitcoin’s value.
The use of Bitcoin for Ordinals NFTs also appears to be slowing, with the trading volume decreasing by 50% on May 11 and remaining far from its size throughout May, according to Dune dashboard by blockchain analyst Domo.
Bitcoin transaction fees also took a short hit two years high on Tuesday when the average price hit $31.14, according to data on BitInfoCharts. That number is now back under $10.
Ethereum is down 5.8% in seven days and is currently changing hands at $1,800. It was one of the lighter declines in a week where, overall, the damage was minimal across the market.
Cryptocurrencies that plunged more than 8% this week include Polygon (MATIC), which fell 11.5% to $0.856058, Avalanche (AVAX) fell 11% to $15.01, Toncoin (TON) sank 11.8% to $1.85, and the Internet Computer (ICP) fell 9.2% to trade at $5.16.
In the news…
On Monday, the American crypto exchange Bittrex filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The news comes weeks after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charges the company that failed to register as a broker-dealer, exchange, and clearing agency and said the agency earned at least $1.3 billion in illicit profits between 2017 and 2022.
Back to March, Bittrex SAYS it halted US operations, with CEO Richie Lai citing the “current US regulatory and economic environment” as reasons for the decision.
At a hearing in Washington on Wednesday, Republican and Democrat lawmakers failed to find common ground to the extent that new regulation is required for digital assets. Their main difficulty is deciding whether a token should be considered a security or a commodity, if the former, then regulatory jurisdiction will be given to the SEC, if the latter, it will go to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC ).
On the same day, Texas legislators voted in favor of an update in the state’s Bill of Rights to include the right of people to own, hold, and use digital currencies. It still has a long way to go, and still needs to pass one more vote in the House, one in the Senate and one vote of the people.
Finally on Thursday the US Chamber of Commerce criticized the SEC for its approach to regulating the implementation of the digital asset industry. It filed an amicus brief in support of Coinbase on the ongoing exchange court petition to get the securities regulator to clarify its rules.
“The SEC is deliberately muddying the waters by assuming the authority to sweep digital assets while deploying a haphazard, enforcement-based approach,” the Chamber wrote. “This regulatory mess is by design, not going to happen.”
