Bitcoin and Ether Experience Moderate Gains as Investors Anticipate U.S. Federal Reserve Chair’s Remarks; Forkast NFT 500 Index Sees a 0.44% Decline.
Bitcoin and Ether saw gains in Tuesday afternoon trade in Asia, as did most other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies. Polygon’s Matic token led with gains, followed by XRP and Dogecoin. Meanwhile, Chinese equity markets led losses in Asia due to weak trade data. Investors are awaiting comments by the US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell later today for clarity on the central bank’s interest rates. The global cryptocurrency market capitalization gained 0.3% to $1.03tn, while the total crypto market volume rose 11.82% to $33.01bn in the last 24 hours.
Sales of Ethereum, the leading blockchain network for NFTs (non-fungible tokens), increased 35.48% to $23.5m, while sales of Solana, the second largest NFT blockchain, rose 23.93% to $3.4m. By NFT collections, the Ethereum-based collection Otherdeed led sales volume with a 248% increase to $2.5m, followed by membership NFT collection Mocaverse. Alien Worlds, a play-and-earn NFT game that runs on Ethereum, has the most owners, with 4.51 million, followed by play-to-earn staple Axie Infinity with 2.03 million.
The Forkast NFT 500 index, which went live on Tuesday, slipped 0.44% to 4,281.36 over the last 24 hours to 4 p.m. on Tuesday in Hong Kong. The index is a proxy measure of the performance of the global NFT market, and includes 500 eligible smart contracts on any given day. European investors digested hawkish remarks from European Central Bank board member Robert Holzmann, who called for four more interest rate hikes of 50 basis points each. The ECB had already pledged to increase interest rates by 50 basis points on March 16.
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