Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.
Markets are ending the week strong after a rocky week of gains and losses. The price of Bitcoin is now $43,139, according to CoinGecko. That’s a seven-day rise of 3%.
All eyes were on the biggest digital asset by market and what it would do before, during, and after the Federal Reserve’s Wednesday announcement on interest rates.
Traders had already priced in that interest rates would stay the same—and they did—and Bitcoin (BTC) traded flat for a bit while other coins and tokens dipped.
But the price of the asset then dropped a bit following a more hawkish press conference in which Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell made it clear that the central bank wasn’t in much of a hurry to lower interest rates. Stocks took a beating, too.
At one point, the lowest BTC traded for was below $42,000 per coin.
Strong economic data dropped yesterday, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announcing that the U.S. added 353,000 new jobs in January and the unemployment rate held at 3.7% for the third month in a row. Stocks rose—along with crypto—Friday morning Eastern Time on the news.
The price of Ethereum, the second biggest digital asset, dropped earlier in the week—facing bigger losses than BTC—before making gains. Ethereum (ETH) is now up a meager 2% over the week and is trading hands for $2,306.
Elsewhere, Solana (SOL) has again been a winner. Over the past week, it’s one of the biggest gainers, the price of Solana jumped by more than 10% for the week ending yesterday. It’s now trading hands for $97.86.
Its price rise is likely due to a flurry of trader activity—transactions on the network shot up to a new all-time high—after the Solana decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator Jupiter finally launched its JUP token airdrop.
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