This Week in Coins: Bitcoin and Ethereum Unmoved in Slow Market Week

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.

Most of the top thirty cryptocurrencies by market capitalization posted negligible losses or gains over the last seven days.

Bitcoin (BTC) starts the weekend at $26,051, pretty much the same level it was at last week.

The world’s most popular cryptocurrency briefly surged on Tuesday after a judge representing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ordered a review of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) denial of crypto asset manager Grayscale’s spot Bitcoin ETF application. The Court said the SEC had failed to provide a “coherent explanation” for the denial.

Ethereum (ETH) took inconsequential seven-day losses of 0.4% and now changes hands at $1,646.

Virtually every other leading cryptocurrency is approximately the same price it was last weekend except Toncoin (TON), which blew up 22% to trade at $1.75, and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which rose 8.6% to $206.87.

Toncoin’s bullish momentum can be attributed to the development of the TON ecosystem.

The TON Foundation, which spun out from Telegram to develop TON, recently released a Telegram-centric Web3 app store and launched a community-driven initiative, Believers.ton, to promote ecosystem development.

Bitcoin Cash was one of the fastest risers when the Grayscale/SEC news broke on Tuesday and appears to have sustained the rally into the weekend. Similarly, Coinbase stock soared 15% in the hours following the news.

Any intraweek gains that Bitcoin and Ethereum made were wiped out early on Friday as the industry reacted to news that the SEC needed more time to approve or reject 6 Bitcoin ETF applications.

All told, it was another excruciatingly slow news cycle this week for those looking to see some sign of growing global crypto adoption. On Thursday, airline Giant Lufthansa launched an NFT-based loyalty program on Polygon. Polygon’s MATIC token didn’t particularly react to the news, though—it ended the week 1.2% higher at a price of around $0.55.

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