By Mat Di Salvo
3 min read
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.
It was a fairly uneventful week in the crypto world... until Friday.
The action-packed end to the week came with an increase in the price of Bitcoin, buoyed by crypto market optimism after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell gave his strongest signal yet that he will slash interest rates come September.
The price of the asset popped above $64,600, according to CoinGecko, a more than 7% rise over the week. It slid into the weekend at $63,500. Still, it's a range not seen since the start of the month.
Investors had been waiting eagerly for the monetary policy bigwig to say something interesting following the release of the U.S. Federal Reserve's July meeting minutes, which also suggested that an interest rate cut would be coming.
Interest rates in the U.S. stand at their highest for more than 20 years after the central bank hiked them in 2022 to tame inflation. Lower interest rates are expected to attract investors to riskier assets like crypto.
Ethereum's price also jumped on the news from the Fed—despite the fact investors continued to pull money out of the newly-approved exchange-traded funds (ETFs) trading on Wall Street. The price of the second-biggest coin ended the week at $2,750 after increasing 6% in seven days.
To top things off, Bitcoin-loving independent candidate for U.S. president Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Friday withdrew of the race and said he'd support crypto-loving Donald Trump. The picture was complicated as he said he was merely "suspending" his campaign and that his supporters would still be able to vote for him in non-battleground states.
The hair-splitting led to chaos on the popular crypto betting site Polymarket, where users had been punting on the various possible outcomes for the November election.
Other major coins and tokens also jumped, with the price of Solana also seeing a healthy rise on Friday. SOL is up nearly 10% over the week to $153 per coin, and meme tokens running on its blockchain are also spiking: Dogwifhat and Floki are two of the biggest gainers over seven days, having both jumped 30%. Dogwifhat is trading hands for $1.84; Floki for $0.00015.
In other crypto news, a Solana "meme coin dev" smoked crack, faked his own death, and hung out with a stripper on stream—only to tell Decrypt the whole story.
And in less crazy crypto news, Grayscale launched a new crypto trust, giving investors exposure to Avalanche. The asset is now trading for $26.30, having jumped 28%—making it this week's winner of the top 20 coins and tokens.
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