Bitcoin Climbs 3% to $26.6K; SOL, NEAR, ADA Lead Crypto Market Gains

Bitcoin (BTC) climbed more than 3% to above $26,600 Wednesday afternoon, its highest price this week as crypto markets pared some of the losses booked in last Thursday’s tumble.

Ether (ETH) advanced 3.5%, inching closer to the $1,700 level.

The gains for both were roughly in line with the CoinDesk Market Index’s (CMI) 3% rise.

Layer 1 blockchain Solana’s SOL jumped nearly 7% during the day as webshop platform Shopify integrated Solana Pay, allowing USDC stablecoin payments for customers.

NEAR, native token of the Near Protocol, added more than 6% after crypto lender Nexo integrated the network into its platform.

Among larger alternative cryptocurrencies – so-called altcoins – Cardano’s ADA, Polkadot’s DOT, and Binance’s BNB each gained 3%-5% during the day.

The gains in crypto mirrored a big move higher in traditional markets, with both the Nasdaq Composite and SP 500 surging more than 1% alongside a 13.5 basis point decline in the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield to 4.19%.

Following the market close, chipmaker giant Nvidia reported sizable earnings and guidance beats, sending its shares higher by 7% and boosting AI-related tokens like Fetch.AI’s FET which rose 9.5%, while AGIX and Render’s RNDR each gained about 5%.

Despite today’s market-wide gains, most digital assets trade significantly lower than a week ago following a double-digit percentage pullback on Thursday, which sent bitcoin at one point plunging below $25,000.

The downtrend for digital assets may continue for weeks, said John Glover, chief investment officer at crypto lender Ledn and former managing director at Barclays.

“Both the technical and fundamental outlook for risk assets, including BTC and ETH, are pointing to softer prices in the next weeks,” Glover noted in an email. “When the techs and the fundamentals align, the marke t prices tend to follow.”

The lack of liquidity and participation on the market currently does not support higher prices, Don Kaufman, co-founder of TheoTrade, pointed out in an interview with CoinDesk TV.

“Liquidity has become a critical concern. I do not believe bitcoin can sustain higher prices without more active market participation,” Kaufman said. “We have seen evidence of fast, unrelenting moves in recent trading sessions, much of which can be traced back to lack of market participation.”

However, crypto investment firm Pantera Capital differs, forecasting that bitcoin likely won’t stay at these depressed price levels for much longer.

“Bitcoin recently experienced the longest period of negative year-over-year returns in its history, lasting 15 months,” Dan Morehead, founder of Pantera, posted on X (formerly Twitter). “Our view is that we’ve seen enough – there’s just so long markets can be down.”

Edited by Stephen Alpher.