This week in coins. Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.
After three consecutive weeks of lossesprices turned green for holders of the two largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization this week.
Bitcoin (BTC) is up 36% over the past seven days and is now trading at around $27,515, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Last week, Bitcoin fell about 10% in response to news that industry servicing Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) had both failed.
The industry’s No. 2 coin, Ethereum (ETH), is back where it was before the downturn. ETH is up 27% over the seven days and is currently changing hands at $1,832.
The entire crypto market grew back to life as of last Sunday evening after the Federal Reserve, the US Treasury and the FDIC announced that they would step in to stop all deposits with Signature and SVB. To promise was repeated by President Biden.
However, crypto did not emerge completely unscathed: The industry has lost its two most crypto-friendly banks, and now conflicting reports are swirling about whether the FDIC is tells potential buyers by Signature Bank that it will have to abandon the bank’s crypto business. Former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank claimed the Feds shut down Signature to send an “anti-crypto message” and a Reuters the report at the end of the week appeared to confirm Frank’s claims; The FDIC has since denied the allegations in Reuters history.
In Great Britain, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt announced that HM Treasury – the British Ministry of Finance – had brokered a rescue deal in which HSBC bought SVB’s British arm. for £1 to do all UK business with exposure to the bank.
In addition to these interventions, investors were drawn into risk-enabled assets such as crypto and technology stocks this week after signs emerged that the banking crisis could spill over into Europe’s TradFi institutions: Swiss credit announced Wednesday a 54 billion dollar loan from the Swiss National Bank to strengthen its liquidity.
Virtually all of the top thirty cryptocurrencies by market capitalization posted significant gains this week, but some of the biggest gainers aside from Bitcoin and Ethereum were Filecoin (FIL), which rose 33% to $6.39, Polygon (MATIC), which grew 22 % to $1.24, Solana (SOL) up 28% to $22.30, and BNB up 25% to $344.76.
USDC – the dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Circle – slipped its peg last weekend, falling all the way to 87 cents after uncertainty about the company’s exposure to the beleaguered banks. That restabilized this week in reaction for the rescue news.