Large-cap cryptos following bitcoin’s lead as SOL, LINK entice traders

After a period of market uncertainty, several large-cap cryptos are flashing signs of a comeback.

The surge is being led by bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) along with other noteworthy digital assets on the back of heightened interest surrounding possible ETF approval next year.

“After the SEC declined to appeal its loss to Grayscale in the circuit court, an approval of a physically-backed BTC ETF in the US became increasingly more likely,” CoinShares head of research James Butterfill said in a statement to Blockworks.

Bitcoin has seen its price increase by 19% over the last seven days, trading at $34,100 as of Wednesday at 6:00 am ET. The asset has registered a 24-hour volume of $44 billion, bolstering its market capitalization to a whopping $661 billion, CoinGecko data shows.

Ether is also on an upward trajectory, with a 14% increase in price over the past week. At $1,785 ether’s 24-hour volume stands at $27.5 billion, contributing to a market cap of $215 billion.

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“What we are potentially seeing is a permanent thawing of so-called ‘crypto winters,’” Diogo Monica, co-founder and president of Anchorage Digital told Blockworks. “While the digital asset market will always have bulls and bears, institutional adoption is pushing us closer to perpetual spring.”

That warming is contributing to other notable rises across major cryptos in the top 20 market cap rankings.

Solana (SOL) and Chainlink (LINK) have outshone their larger counterparts in terms of weekly performance. SOL registered a remarkable 33% increase over the past seven days to above $31. Meanwhile, LINK surged by a staggering 49% over the week to stand at $11, marking it as the best performer among large-cap coins.

A spokesperson for analytics firm CryptoQuant told Blockworks that given recent activities with the LINK, the hype is taking up the crypto space. “It’s not artificial,” they said. The firm pointed to increased trading volume across centralized exchanges as well as increased daily active addresses and total tokens transferred from senders to receivers.

Data also shows XRP and Cardano (ADA) have been enjoying the uplift. XRP has experienced a 14% increase over the last week to $0.56, while Cardano has seen a 13% rise to $0.27 in the same period.

Not all crypto within the top 20 have shared the same trader enthusiasm.

BNB, the native token of the Binance platform, and Shiba Inu (SHIB), the meme coin that previously caught the world’s attention, have been lagging. BNB saw a weekly increase of just 6.4% to $225, while Shiba Inu struggled with a mere 7% increase over the same period.

That’s a far cry for BNB which, at its height, had topped out at $704 on May 21, 2021, data shows.

“While the future is inherently uncertain, the current trajectory and market sentiment suggest a promising outlook for bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency market,” Butterfill said.

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