Gains in US equities, Bitcoin, Ether, and Polygon are the highest since June

All top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap, excluding stablecoins, were up in Monday morning trading in Asia, including Bitcoin and Ether. As Wall Street prepares for this week’s largest week of the earnings season so far, U.S. stocks ended last week higher, posting their biggest days of gains since June.

According to data from CoinMarketCap, Bitcoin increased 1.9% in the last day to trade at US$19,576, while Ether increased 4.3% to trade at US$1,368. Both Solana and Cardano experienced significant price increases, climbing 4.6% and 2.7%, respectively, to trade at US$29.33 and $0.36, respectively.

Following a week in which the network published impressive adoption data indicating it is currently hosting 53,000 decentralized apps on the network, an eightfold rise since the beginning of the year, Polygon witnessed the most increases in CoinMarketCap’s top 10, climbing 8.6% to US$0.90.

On Friday, U.S. stocks recorded their largest day of gains since June. The S&P 500 increased by 2.4%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 2.5%, and the Nasdaq Composite Index gained 2.4% on the day.

These gains come after San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly suggested that the Fed should start thinking about slowing down its current pace of interest rate hikes, stating that the Fed does not want to over-tighten, in a speech at the University of California Berkeley. 

Despite this, she continued, she thinks interest rates could go to 5% in 2023, albeit the rate of increases could slow.

In order to combat runaway inflation, which was at 8.2% in September, close to a forty-year high, the Fed hiked interest rates by almost 300 basis points from close to zero in March. The Fed has said it will keep raising interest rates until inflation reaches its 2% target range.

The banking behemoths Bank of America Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are among the large U.S. companies that have so far reported earnings that have exceeded expectations. 

This week, an additional 165 S&P 500 companies and 12 Dow components are anticipated to release their financial results.