Bitcoin edged higher in Thursday morning trading in Asia, along with most other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies, but the token has lost much of its support at the US$30,000 line. Investors said buying enthusiasm for Bitcoin has faded after recent gains sparked by exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications and Ripple’s favorable court ruling in the case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ether fell back.



Bitcoin flatlines







Bitcoin rose 0.44% to US$29,919.68 as of 6:30 a.m. in Hong Kong, according to data from CoinMarketCap. The world’s largest cryptocurrency fluctuated around the US$30,000 support price earlier in the morning, but is now down 1.45% in the past seven days.



“Crypto has been relatively flat following a stream of good news,” Nick Ruck, the chief operating officer of Singapore-based blockchain infrastructure platform ContentFi Labs, said in emailed comments. “The Bitcoin ETF news has been priced in and the market is waiting to see the financial products in action.”



The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock and several other U.S. financial institutions started filing applications for Spot Bitcoin ETFs from mid-June, helping move Bitcoin’s price north of US$31,500 at one stage last week.



Ruck added that the U.S. court ruling last week in favor of Ripple Labs and its XRP token also helped drive the price gains, but the case isn’t the end of the regulatory war since the SEC can appeal the case to a higher court. 



“This case also didn’t finalize whether XRP and other tokens are securities, but instead added more regulatory confusion on how and when a token can be considered a security in some cases but not others,” said Ruck.



Adrian Wang, the chief executive officer of Hong Kong-based digital asset manager Metalpha, agreed the optimism around XRP and ETFs looked to have run out of steam. He added in emailed comments that XRP had only a partial victory as the district court said “institutional sales of the tokens violated federal securities laws.”



Nonetheless, Ripple was the biggest gainer among the top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies Thursday morning. The token jumped 8.02% to US$0.8275 and added to a weekly surge of 75.85%.



Other gainers included Cardano, which added 5.81% to US$0.3224 and is up 12.04% for the week. Solana rose 4.67% to US$26.53 for a weekly gain of 20.62%.



On Wednesday, Solana Labs, the blockchain infrastructure developer behind the token of the same name, introduced a new developer tool named Solang that it said will make smart contracts on the blockchain more accessible.



Ether was the main loser in early Asia trading, with the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization slipping 0.37% to US$1,892.30.  However, it is still up 1.17% in the last week and has gained 57% for the year to date. 



The total crypto market capitalization edged up 0.01% in the past 24 hours to US$1.2 trillion, with trading volume dipped 3.50% to US$31.11 billion.