This Week in Coins: Bitcoin Bounces Back as Bankman-Fried Appeals Conviction

Is Bitcoin back? For at least a little while, it feels like it may be.

This time last week, it was trading for $53,229. It’s now trading above $60,000, according to CoinGecko. That’s a 12% rise over seven days, and a threshold unseen since last month. 

The price rise came as traders grew more confident that the Fed would slash interest rates by 50 basis points instead of 25. All eyes are on the central bank next week after two years of sky-high interest rates—and inflation.

Now, it’s expected that Fed under Chair Jerome Powell will cut them at the next meeting. The question is just by how much. 

Bitcoin preacher Michael Saylor is still bullish, that’s for sure. The tech entrepreneur said in an interview Monday that the biggest asset would hit $13 million per coin in 21 years.

His company MicroStrategy then later revealed it had spent another $1.1 billion on the orange coin. 

The second-biggest digital coin Ethereum also jumped back. Its price now stands at $2,442 after jumping nearly 11% in seven days. It had recently struggled and hit its lowest level of the year but is now climbing up again.

There was more drama for Tether this week after Consumer protection group Consumers’ Research said in a report that the company behind the biggest stablecoin, USDT, was a “disaster for consumers waiting to happen.”

It argued that its lack of transparency around its dollar reserves was the issue. 

The price of XRP, the seventh biggest digital asset, shot up following news that Grayscale had launched a new product that gave investors exposure to the Ripple-aligned asset. It’s now trading for $0.57 after rising 10% over the week.

And on Friday, Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers filed to get the ex-FTX boss and convicted criminal’s fraud charges overturned. 

They argued that the crypto crook—now serving a 25-year sentence—“was presumed guilty” from the beginning and that the collapsed exchange always had the cash to pay back customers.