As the Federal Open Market Committee wraps up their January 28th meeting, the price of Bitcoin and XRP, along with the rest of the crypto market, shows modest gains and renewed institutional interest. Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market cap has increased by 0.95%, attributed in part to the recovery of previous oversold conditions and continued buying by institutional investors.
Bitcoin (BTC), at the time of this writing, is at approximately $88,000, and Ethereum is at about $2,700. Investors seem confident, evidenced by the historical peaks of ‘safe-haven’ assets like gold and silver. The $2,700 price tag is the highest Ethereum has seen. Crowding in both of these assets suggests renewed investor confidence.
The Federal Reserve is gearing up for its first meeting of the year which will be held from January 27-28. These policymakers will make the decision on whether or not the federal funds rate will be altered from its current 3.5-3.75% standing.
The markets suggest that the Fed will likely not make any changes after the Fed has implemented three rate increases of 0.25% in order to support employment and to counter the deflationary pressure.
There has been a cooling labor market and the Federal Reserve has been concerned about the potential for a rise in inflation. December meeting transcripts stated that a conservative approach was supported by some Fed members to avoid inflation and closely watch the economy.
Renewed indications of bullish momentum have been recorded with bitcoin with it climbing to around $88,355 and with it up statistically, 0.76% over the past 24 hours despite the price being down 4.5% comapred to the previous week. Given the activity surrounding bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), it appears the rebound is being attributed to ETFs.
While net bitcoin ETF inflows of $6.84 million put an end to what was previously a streak of 5 consecutive days of outflows, SoSoValue reported that US spot bitcoin ETFs were inflowing $6.84 million.
For the spot ethereum ETFs, the volume of net inflows was significantly higher, at $117 million, and the Solana ETFs were inflowing approximately $2.46 million. Momentum of this nature, with the price push of higher projection, should $90,000 is able to be broken for what should be considered a reasonable psychological barrier for the BTC price and going closer to $92,000 is something that should not be dismissed.
XRP is showing it too can recover, especially with it registering an increase of over 0.81% in the past 24 hours and by it experiencing a week of price decline. Its price was trending on the higher side and statistically speaking, it was due to the interest the institutions were showing and to the purchasing, it was attributed to the regulation getting clearer.
It appears the confidence is being attributed to recent ETF inflows of $7.76 million. For $XRP, it has managed to successully hold the price levels around the $1.85 mark and the open interest for the derivatives is up by 3.02% to around $3.40 billion.
One notable XRP Ledger record that XRP will be celebrating is the XRP Ledger reaching over $1 billion in tokenized assets. This illustrates the growing popularity of blockchain asset tokenization.
This could also help build network demand for XRP Ledger in the long run. Despite the FOMC decision, BTC and XRP are likely to have a short-term recovery. If inflows for ETFs remain positive and interest rates are stagnant, these will be the major drivers of BTC and XRP.
