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Cryptocurrencies rallied on Monday.
Dreamstime
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies rallied on Monday, playing catch-up to gains in the stock market after digital assets looked to have lost some of their correlation with equities late last week.
The price of
Bitcoin
jumped almost 6%, holding well above the psychologically important $30,000 mark at $30,500. The largest cryptocurrency continues to trade at less than half of its all-time high near $69,000, reached in November 2021, but is above the lows near $26,000 from the depths of a recent selloff.
Ether,
the second-largest digital asset, gained 7% to around $1,900. The token underpinning the Ethereum blockchain network hit an all-time high near $4,900 last November and continues to trade at its lowest levels since July 2021.
Smaller cryptos, or altcoins, outperformed.
Solana
surged 9%,
Cardano
gained 12%, and Polkadot rose 9%. It was much of the same for “memecoins”—called that because there were initially internet jokes, not serious blockchain projects—as
Dogecoin
ticked up 5% and
Shiba Inu
soared 11%.
Bitcoin and its peers should theoretically trade independently of mainstream financial markets, but have shown themselves to be largely correlated with other risk-sensitive assets, like stocks. Nevertheless, cryptos have been hurt even more than stocks in the selloff this year.
While some of the correlation with stocks seemed to come undone last Friday—when equities rallied and Bitcoin mostly tread water—it had returned by Monday. Cryptos gained in tandem with global stocks and U.S. stock-index futures, with investors upbeat about news that China would be easing some of its disruptive Covid-19 restrictions.
Write to Jack Denton at jack.denton@dowjones.com