This Week in Coins: Bitcoin Jumps on Fed Decision, Trump Launches DeFi Project

By Mat Di Salvo

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.

Bitcoin shot up this week following long-expected cuts from the Federal Reserve Wednesday. The biggest digital coin is now priced at $63,125 per coin, according to CoinGecko—a more than 5% seven-day rise. 

The price jump came after Jerome Powell announced that the central bank would be cutting by 50 basis points, while some were expecting a smaller 25 basis point cut. The Fed hiked interest rates to a two-decade high in 2022 in order to tame inflation. Investors had been waiting for a cut, but didn’t know how big it would be. 

But after Powell made the announcement, traders rushed back into riskier assets like stocks and crypto—which typically do better in a low-interest-rate environment. 

It’s worth noting, though, that the biggest digital coin still has a way to go before it touches its all-time record price of $73,737 set this March. 

The second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, Ethereum, is up by almost 6% over the past week. The coin rose despite investors continuing to cash out of the newly-approved exchange-traded funds (ETFs). 

In other news, Donald Trump finally launched his crypto project. In a live interview with Rug Radio (Decrypt’s sister company), the Republican presidential candidate and his allies said that the decentralized finance (DeFi) project, dubbed World Liberty Financial, would offer borrowing and lending services for cryptocurrencies on Ethereum’s network. 

Elsewhere, MicroStrategy continued buying Bitcoin, adding another $458.2 million in orange coins to its balance sheet, and a judge threw out Ethereum software giant Consensys’ lawsuit against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

And of the top coins and tokens by market cap, Solana has continued to surge, adding 8% to its value over the week. The fifth biggest coin is now priced at $147.69, as per CoinGecko. 

But Avalanche is this week’s winner, having jumped 11% in seven days, and currently trading hands for $27.57.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

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