This week, the cryptocurrency market has been correcting downwards, and now the BTC token is trading around 61200.00 (–6.9%), ETH is at 2380.00 (–10.6%), USDT is at 1.0000 (–0.01%), BNB is 550.00 (–7.6%), and SOL is 139.00 (–13.1%). By the end of the week, the total market capitalization decreased to 2.13T dollars, and the share of BTC was 56.31%.

The negative dynamics were due to a combination of monetary and geopolitical factors. The key reason is a possible slowdown in the US Fed’s monetary policy easing. Investors believed that after the September interest rate adjustment by –50 basis points, the regulator would maintain this volume of changes in the future. However, on Monday, the head of the regulator, Jerome Powell, said that officials intend to exercise caution, and the two remaining reductions in the cost of borrowing this year will be 25 basis points each. Later, other board members supported this position. Thus, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Thomas Barkin, noted that the high inflation and the state of the labor market limit further monetary policy easing possibilities. In August, the number of open vacancies increased by 8.040M, and employment, according to Automatic Data Processing (ADP), added 143.0K instead of the expected 124.0K. If today’s federal statistics confirm the high figures, the likelihood of a significant interest rate cut will decrease.

The second reason for the weakening of the cryptocurrency market was the sharp increase in geopolitical tensions in the Middle East after the Iranian missile attack on Israel on Tuesday. The situation led to investors abandoning risky assets and strengthening the American dollar and gold, confirmed by a significant outflow of capital from spot funds. Thus, Bitcoin-ETF lost 299.9M dollars over the last four sessions and Ethereum-ETF – 32.8M dollars. Nevertheless, most experts expect the pressure on the digital market will be short-term, and US Fed officials will not abandon monetary easing but do it more slowly than expected.

In the latest news, it is worth highlighting the filing of an application by asset manager Bitwise to launch a spot exchange-traded fund based on the XRP token. It is unlikely that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will approve the new instrument anytime soon, especially in the context of the unresolved dispute with Ripple. However, the fact illustrates the growing interest in funds based on an increasingly wide range of cryptocurrencies. Currently, Bitcoin-ETF and Ethereum-ETF are actively working, and applications for spot Solana-ETF from VanEck and 21Shares are awaiting decisions from the authorities. Meanwhile, payment giant SWIFT announced the launch of testing the possibility of conducting cross-border transactions in digital currencies next year. The management hopes to solve the problem of cryptocurrencies created on different blockchains and allow them to interact with each other and with traditional finance easily. It is also worth noting that Visa Inc. announced the imminent launch of the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP), which is currently undergoing final testing. The project will allow financial institutions to create and offer clients digital assets backed by regular money, such as stablecoins and tokenized deposits.

Overall, the situation in the cryptocurrency market remains difficult, and next week, most of the largest digital assets may begin to consolidate or resume growth.