IMX, the native token of non-fungible tokens platform ImmutableX, surged on Thursday, led by South Korean traders. The cryptocurrency rose 35% to 74 cents during Asian trading hours, CoinDesk data show. Major cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), XRP and BNB traded 0.5% to 1% lower. The IMX price rally is accompanied by an over 22% increase in the 24-hour global trading volume, which rose to $556 million. The IMX-Korean won (IMX/KRW) pair listed on South Korea’s Upbit exchange accounted for nearly 20% of the global activity, followed by Binance’s IMX-tether (IMX/USDT) pair, which contributed 7% to the total volume, according to data source Coingecko.

Bitcoin traded in a tight range in the past 24 hours, staying between $25,800 and $26,000 after a price spike last week when the cryptocurrency topped $28,000 after a federal appeals court ruled the SEC must review its rejection of Grayscale Investments’ attempt to convert its GBTC into an ETF. Bitcoin retreated as the SEC delayed key ETF decisions that were expected on Friday, damping traders’ hopes of a long-term recovery. “As we enter September, the cryptoasset market remains on the edge of its seat as various macroeconomic and regulatory narratives continue to leave investors guessing,” said Simon Peters, an analyst at eToro. “With the route to lower rates still unclear and bitcoin spot ETF approvals still waiting, the market will continue its guessing game on major cryptoassets’ direction of travel.” Stellar’s XLM was the only digital asset which saw notable gains on Monday, advancing 10% on the day.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) delayed until October a decision on all spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications submitted by firms including BlackRock, WisdomTree, Invesco Galaxy, Wise Origin, VanEck, Bitwise and Valkyrie Digital Assets, according to agency filings on Thursday. The SEC began reviewing the latest slate of applications from both crypto-heavy and traditional finance firms last month. The applicants hope to launch the first spot bitcoin ETF, which advocates have argued will allow for greater retail investment in the bitcoin market while saving investors the trouble of setting up a wallet or having to buy the cryptocurrency directly.

X, the Elon Musk-owned social media platform formerly called Twitter, has obtained payments licenses from several U.S. states in recent months, including a currency transmitter license in Rhode Island earlier this week. While Musk has hinted at supporting crypto on the platform – even briefly switching out Twitter’s bird logo to dogecoin’s dog before its rebranding to X last month – the licenses allow for broader payments services to be offered. Musk has said that he plans for X to expand beyond social media posts, to eventually become an ‘everything app.’ The money transmitter licenses obtained since June from Arizona, Maryland, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri and New Hampshire indicate the tech billionaire may have plans to support payment processing nationwide similar to Venmo or PayPal, a company he co-founded. The Rhode Island license, while essential for permitting payments, is also a requirement for offering crypto services.

Bitcoin (BTC) gained nearly 8%, topping $28,000 at one point on Tuesday afternoon after a federal appeals court ruled that the SEC must review its rejection of Grayscale Investments’ attempt to convert its GBTC into an ETF. As has been typical with such rallies for many months, the crypto quickly gave back a chunk of those gains, with bitcoin trading just under $27,400 at press time, still up more than 5% over the past 24 hours. GBTC also saw its busiest trading session in 14 months, with nearly 20 million shares changing hands through the day, the most since the June 2022 crypto market crash, according to Yahoo data. The share price surged 18% to almost $21, the highest since bitcoin hit $31,000 in mid-July while the fund’s discount to net asset value (NAV) narrowed to as low as 15%, a level not seen since December 2021. Other movers included bitcoin cash (BCH), which has surged 15% over the last 24 hours. Stacks (STX), a bitcoin layer 2 protocol, was also a top gainer following the news, gaining 20% on the day. DCG, the parent company of Grayscale, also owns CoinDesk.

Bitcoin (BTC) has fallen back below $26,000, losing 0.73% on the day, reflecting generally bearish sentiment among crypto traders and a lack of bullish catalysts to rally markets. BTC fell as low as $25,886 on Monday after rallying briefly last week to $26,200, but has since dropped back close to where it started last week. Institutional crypto exchange LMAX Digital said in a note that bitcoin is getting closer to a breakout from the current range due to how tight the contraction has gotten in recent sessions. “Whenever ranges get too tight, it’s often a warning sign for a surge in volatility,” the exchange said in a note. Etoro analyst Simon Peters said softness in the market is also being seen in other asset classes, such as equities. He said in a morning note that this comes as investors “pay close attention to the discussions at Jackson Hole …The indication from Wyoming is that central bankers are intent on keeping rates at higher levels to prevent a resurgence in inflation – which is not being taken well by risk assets across the board.”

Stablecoin issuer Num Finance has rolled out a Colombian peso-pegged token on the Polygon network, the company said in a press release on Thursday. Named nCOP, the token is overcollateralized by reserve assets and allows people and businesses to transfer, pay, earn and save money using blockchain rails, the press release said. The new offering arrives as stablecoins, a roughly $124 billion subset of digital assets, are increasingly in demand in emerging regions with frail financial systems such as Latin America and Turkey. People also use these cryptocurrencies to send remittances and store value, according to a report by crypto research firm Chainalysis. “Currently, Colombia is one of the main recipients of remittances in Latin America, with nearly USD 10 billion flowing into the country,” Agustín Liserra, CEO of Num Finance, said in a statement. “Num Finance aims to provide a new possibility for people to send and receive nCOP as remittances and receive a yield on it.”

Bitcoin posted a sizable advance on Wednesday, rising nearly 5% at one point to just shy of $26,800 alongside a rally in traditional markets as interest rates retreated. Institutional cryptocurrency exchange LMAX Digital noted that trading volume has been trending up over the week but saw a significant increase on Wednesday. “Bitcoin volumes printed $173 million, 59% above 30-day average volume and ether volumes printed $92 million, 70% above 30-day average volume,” the exchange said in a morning note. The uptick for bitcoin’s price and trading volumes stems from traditional markets, said LMAX, “with stocks rallying and the U.S. dollar selling off, cryptocurrencies were able to benefit.”

Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value, dropped just below the $26,000 mark on Wednesday after trading in a tight range over the past 24 hours and hitting a weekly low of $25,500. The cryptocurrency rebounded slightly from the low, but remains down 9% over the last seven days as markets await developments from the central bankers’ meeting at Jackson Hole on Friday. “It is possible that any semblance of dovishness from Jay Powell on Friday could help inspire a recovery. Beyond that, we also have a potential ruling in the Grayscale case to look forward to,” Sean Farrell, head of digital asset strategy at Fundstrat, wrote in a note. Farrell said he thinks the market is closer to a local bottom rather than top, given the absence of industry-specific catalysts and a decline in liquidity.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN) bought a minority stake in stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Financial. The two companies also dissolved their Centre Consortium partnership, which issued USD Coin (USDC), the world’s second-largest stablecoin. As part of the move, Circle will bring issuance and governance of USDC fully in-house. Also, six more blockchains will gain native support for USDC, which is pegged at $1, bringing the total number of supported blockchains to 15. Coinbase and Circle, in a blog post and interviews with CoinDesk, did not disclose the size of the stake acquired by Coinbase. Coinbase did not give Circle cash for the stake, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A bullish inverse head-and-shoulders price pattern is building in the combined market capitalization of altcoins. The term “altcoin” is short for “alternative coin” and, in this case, refers to cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin, ether and top stablecoins. A potential completion of the pattern would signal “alt season,” or outperformance of alternative cryptocurrencies relative to bitcoin and ether, according to technical analysis by Josh Olszewicz, a crypto trader and former researcher at Valkyrie Investments. Olszewicz analyzed the charts of altcoins, excluding ether and prominent stablecoins. The inverse head-and-shoulders, one of the most trusted bullish technical analysis patterns in the market, forms when an asset chalks out three price troughs, with the middle one being the lowest. A breakout or a bearish-to-bullish trend change is confirmed once prices rise above the trendline (neckline), connecting the peaks between the lows.

Coinbase (COIN), the large publicly traded U.S. crypto exchange, said its new Base blockchain, a “layer 2 network,” has gone live, heralding the start of a new era of public companies running their own distributed networks. Base was already live for testing by developers, and it became open to the public at noon ET on Wednesday. The move could ultimately allow Coinbase to garner fees from running its own blockchain, in addition to a potentially even more lucrative stream of revenue from applications built atop it, executives say. Layer 2 networks are built atop base ones, relieving congestion on the underlying network. Base is built upon the Ethereum blockchain.

Bitcoin rose 2.3% in the past 24 hours to close to $30,000 as investors wait for July’s Consumer Price Index, a gauge of inflation in the U.S., which is scheduled to be released on Thursday. Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, is expected to come in at 0.4%, far below the pace seen a year ago. Lower inflation should mean the Federal Reserve will be less likely to raise rates. Oliver Rust, head of product at independent inflation data aggregator Truflation, predicts that the inflation numbers will show that CPI spiked from 3% to 3.4% in July. “Over the past three months, the rapid decline in inflation allowed consumers to regain their purchasing power, with wages growing at a faster rate than prices. This has resulted in the resurgence of rampant consumer spending, pushing up prices in the all-important food category,” Rust wrote in a morning note.

Bitcoin and ether remained little changed over the past 24 hours, another sign of just how tepid the market is, as even the entry of payment giant PayPal (PYPL) into the stablecoin market failed to move the needle. Both bitcoin and ether haven’t moved much in price on the day and have seen low trading volumes over the past few weeks. “The prevailing outlook suggests that in the absence of an ETF-triggered catalyst or substantial cryptocurrency-related drama, these price levels could persist for an extended period,” Matteo Bottacini, at Crypto Finance AG, wrote in a morning note.

A rebound in the price of bitcoin has sharply narrowed losses for MicroStrategy’s (MSTR) holdings of the cryptocurrency. When Michael Saylor stepped down almost exactly a year ago as CEO of MicroStrategy to become its executive chairman with a sole focus on investing in bitcoin, his digital-asset strategy was looking pretty bleak. He had already spent billions of dollars of MicroStrategy’s money to purchase bitcoin — and his paper loss amounted to about $1 billion. Today, though, MicroStrategy’s position looks brighter as bitcoin’s price has rebounded to above $29,000. Saylor has bought more. MicroStrategy now owns 152,800 bitcoins, up from 129,699 when he surrendered the CEO job. Those new purchases have lowered MicroStrategy’s cost basis to $29,672. Bottom line: MicroStrategy, a software company that has become a proxy for bitcoin’s price because of its largest holdings of the cryptocurrency, is nearly back in the black with bitcoin. (The full story will be available on CoinDesk at 9:30 a.m. ET.)

Coinbase, the biggest publicly traded U.S. crypto exchange, announced that Base, its layer-2 blockchain built with Optimism’s OP Stack, will open to the public next Wednesday. Base went live for developers in July so that they could test applications on the network. Users are now able to transfer their ether to Base, Coinbase wrote in a blog post. The Base announcement came ahead of Coinbase releasing its second-quarter results. Its revenue topped analysts’ expectations, and its loss was narrower than expected.

A legion of Twitter bots pumped the price of crypto tokens traded by Sam Bankman-Fried’s quant trading firm Alameda Research shortly after FTX listed the tokens, according to a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute. NCRI, an institution that studies cybersecurity and social-media threats, published a report on Wednesday that shows that “inauthentic chatter” on Twitter, now X, heavily influenced the prices of five FTX-listed tokens traded by Alameda insiders. The coins were BOBA, GALA, IMX, RNDR and SPELL. Fake tweets regarding the coins surged — by as much as 30% in some cases — after FTX officially listed them, with “inauthentic” comments eventually comprising roughly half of all Twitter posts about the tokens.

Binance counts China as its largest market, followed by South Korea, Turkey, Vietnam, and the British Virgin Islands, according to documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reports that despite the ban on crypto within China, teams from Binance regularly collaborate with Chinese law enforcement to detect potential criminal activity. It also has 900,000 active users in-country, according to the report. A spokesperson for the exchange did not immediately respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment. Data from the Journal shows that China is a $80.6 billion futures market and a $9.4 billion spot market for Binance. Second place South Korea provides $56.9 billion in futures volume and $1.39 billion in spot volume, and fifth place British Virgin Islands is responsible for $12.82 billion in spot volume and $5 billion in futures volume.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued internet marketer Richard Schueler, known online as Richard Heart, and his projects Hex, PulseChain and PulseX, alleging he raised over $1 billion across three different unregistered securities offerings. Heart also defrauded his investors, the SEC alleged in its Monday lawsuit, by using investor funds for personal goods. “Heart continually touted these investments as a pathway to grandiose wealth for investors, claiming that Hex, for example, ‘was built to be the highest appreciating asset that has ever existed in the history of man,'” the lawsuit read. “Although Heart claimed these investments were for the vague purpose of supporting free speech, he did not disclose that he used millions of dollars of PulseChain investor funds to buy luxury goods for himself.”

Curve, a stablecoin-focused decentralized exchange (DEX), was the victim of an exploit late Sunday according to a tweet from the project. Curve relies on smart contracts instead of middlemen to offer financial services such as stablecoin borrowing, trading and lending to users. Upwards of $100 million worth of cryptocurrency are at risk due to a “re-entrancy” bug in Vyper, a programming language used to power parts of the Curve system. Several stablecoin pools on the platform — used for pricing and liquidity on a number of different DeFi services — have been drained by hackers so far, though the amount was unclear at press time. BlockSec, a blockchain auditing firm, estimated total losses above $42 million in a preliminary analysis posted to Twitter. While CRV, the DEX’s native token, was trading down 12% over the last 24 hours per Coinbase, it has interestingly surged 500% on South Korea-based digital assets exchange Bithumb.

Bitcoin could reach $300,000 by 2028, said Mark Yusko, Morgan Creek Capital Management founder and CEO, on CoinDesk TV’s First Mover. Yusko made the prediction while comparing bitcoin to gold. Gold is not portable or divisible, whereas bitcoin is, the CEO of the $1.6 billion asset management firm explained. “Bitcoin fixes both of these issues, and is equally scarce,” Yusko added, arguing that the digital asset could eventually catch up to the precious metal’s valuation. “The monetary value of gold is about $6 trillion, I think bitcoin can replace all of that, the monetary equivalent of $6 trillion is about a 10X from here, which gives us a price of about $300K,” said Yusko.

Meta (META) hasn’t given up on the metaverse despite a very public pivot to artificial intelligence. “Our investments in AI continue,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the company earnings call Wednesday evening. “We remain fully committed to the Metaverse vision as well,” he continued. “We’ve been working on both of these two major priorities for many years in parallel now, and in many ways the two areas are overlapping and complementary.”. The focus on the metaverse hasn’t been profitable for the social media giant – Meta’s Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) unit, which is responsible for metaverse, lost $13.7 billion on revenue of $2.2 billion in 2022, up from a loss of $10.2 billion on revenue of $2.3 billion the previous year.

Meme cryptocurrency dogecoin (DOGE) jumped 10% on Tuesday, registering its largest single-day gain since April 3, according to Binance data tracked by charting platform TradingView. The crypto has gained 25% over the past two weeks amid speculation that it could be used as a payment mechanism on the rebranded Twitter platform. “As crypto is entering the summer lull that we initially expected for August, DOGE might be the summer’s highflyer as other crypto themes are taking a backseat,” said Markus Thielen, head of research and strategy at Matrixport “Musk is on a marketing tour in re-inventing Twitter,” he added. Bitcoin (BTC), meanwhile, remained near a one-month low just above $29,000 as investors await the release of the U.S. Federal Reserve policy announcement later today.

Following its decline below $29,000 for the first time in a month on Monday, bitcoin (BTC) was trading at $29,100 early Tuesday. The bearish price action comes ahead of the Federal Reserve’s expected 25 basis point interest rate hike on Wednesday afternoon. With investors fully anticipating the move, Mike Schwitalla, head of trading at Crypto Finance AG, will be looking to see if market participants receive the actual decision as hawkish. Should slight selloffs ensue in risk markets, he’s looking at support zones for bitcoin around $28,000, $26,000, and $25,000.

Messaging platform Telegram issued $270 million in bonds this week to fund its growth until “we reach the break-even point,” CEO Pavel Durov announced Tuesday. The platform is not yet profitable and has rising expenses due to its “massive growth,” Durov said. It’s onboarding 2.5 million new users a day and earlier this year hit 800 million monthly active users. “I personally bought about a quarter of the new Telegram bonds, investing tens of millions into Telegram’s growth. This comes in addition to the hundreds of millions I spent over the last 10 years to keep Telegram operational,” Durov said. The alternative messaging platform has long been a favorite among crypto enthusiasts. That’s partly attributable to the company’s defunct efforts to launch its own crypto token, GRAM.

Moons (MOON), the native token of Reddit’s r/CryptoCurrency community of over 6.5 million users, has chalked up a triple-digit percentage price gain this week. One analyst cited Reddit’s recent change in terms of service as a possible reason for the impressive price rally, which has seen MOON’s price has surging 170% to almost 25 cents from 9 cents, according to data tracked by Coingecko. The cryptocurrency is listed on SushiSwap, Gate.io and MEXC. Moons are ERC-20 tokens distributed as rewards to users for their posts or comments in the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit. The coins can be freely traded, tipped, or spent in the community for different purposes. The tokens can also be stored in Reddit’s Ethereum-based wallet, called Vault. The Bricks (BRICK) token, distributed as a reward for contributions in the r/Fortnite subreddit, has surged 300% in two days.

Traders in the perpetual futures market tied to the BNB token are leaning bearish as the embattled cryptocurrency faces a challenging environment on multiple fronts. Data tracked by Coinglass show open interest and volume-weighted funding rates in perpetual futures have slipped to -0.18%, the lowest since late April. Those numbers mean shorts, or positions that profit from a price drop, are dominant, and are willing to pay longs to keep their bearish bets open. Funding rates are charged every eight hours. “BNB is being heavily shorted,” Huff Haus, co-founder of Pear Protocol, said, referring to the deeply negative funding rates.

Ripple’s XRP has surpassed Binance’s BNB token to become the world’s four-largest digital asset by market cap after its 66% post-court ruling advance brought its valuation to $41.44 billion, according to CoinDesk data. BNB – which rallied 6.5% in wake of the court ruling – now has a market cap of $40.57 billion. Ripple bulls however, shouldn’t forget the second part of yesterday’s court decision. “The Court has found Ripple to be in violation of securities laws, specifically in relation to direct sales to institutional investors,” wrote CoinShares’ Head of Product Townsend Lansing in an email to CoinDesk. “As such, XRP is not only deemed a security, but questions have arisen regarding the legality of its offering,” he continued. “In regards to these sales, the Court has confirmed that the law was indeed violated, marking a considerable victory for the SEC and setting a precedent for its legal actions against other cryptocurrencies.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) related crypto tokens posted gains after Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday unveiled a new AI company called xAI as an alternative to popular chatbot ChatGPT. SingularityNET (AGIX) rose 11% over the past 24-hours, while Fetch.ai (FET) climbed about 7% over the same time period. The team will be led by Musk and includes members that have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto, according to the company website. The newly formed company will be a separate entity from Musk’s X Corp., but xAI said it will work closely with his other companies. xAI will host Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th.

Dollar-pegged stablecoin TrueUSD (TUSD) is trading at a discount relative to peer tether (USDT) on Binance.US, the U.S. subsidiary of Binance. At press time, the TUSD/USDT pair traded at 89 cents on Binance.US, having hit a low of 80 cents on Wednesday, data from charting platform TradingView show. On Binance, the pair traded at around $0.9980. Volatility in stablecoins, which have evolved as funding currencies over the past three years, often feeds into the broader market, though so far this hasn’t happened in this instance as bitcoin continues to trade in a tight range just above $30,000. TUSD, with a market cap of $3 billion, poses less of a systemic risk to the broader market than tether, whose market cap is $83 billion.