CoinDesk 20 Index: 1,849.02 +0.94%
Bitcoin (BTC): $58,248.56 +0.33%
Ether (ETH): $2,369.12 +0.95%
S&P 500: 5,595.76 +0.75%
Gold: $2,567.76 +0.37%
Nikkei 225: 36,581.76 -0.68%

Bitcoin was little changed, drifting mainly between $57,800 and $58,200 and trading just 0.33% higher over 24 hours at $58,250. The listlessness is a possible sign the world's largest cryptocurrency is taking a breather following its recovery from $53,800 a week ago. The broader digital asset market has risen around 0.9%, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 Index, with XRP rallying more than 5% to lead the gains. XRP was buoyed on Thursday by digital asset manager Grayscale's launch of a trust offering exposure to the token, paving the way for a possible effort to turn it into an exchange-traded fund, as it did with its BTC and ETH products.

The market value of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) has hit $12 billion, according to research by crypto exchange Binance. Bigwigs from Wall Street, including BlackRock and Fidelity, have successfully forayed into RWAs alongside several crypto-native projects such as Securitize and Polymath. Tokenized treasury funds, digital representations of the U.S. Treasury notes, have surpassed $2.2 billion in market value, with BlackRock's BUIDL boasting nearly $520 million. With a market cap of $434 million, Franklin Templeton's FBOXX is the second-largest tokenized Treasury product. Elevated interest rates in the U.S. have catalyzed the rapid growth and leadership of the tokenized Treasuries market, according to Binance Research.

Starknet token holders voted on Friday to implement staking on the layer-2 network, a proposal that’s been in the works since July, in a landmark governance election on Snapshot's new decentralized Snapshot X platform. The vote, which went live on Tuesday, passed with overwhelming support, though only 0.08% of eligible voters took part. A full 98.94% of participants voted in favor of implementing staking, while 0.45% abstained and 0.61% voted against it. The new mechanism on Starknet means that anyone holding more than 20,000 of the project's native token, STRK, will be able to stake on the network, starting in the fourth quarter of this year.

Gold rose to a record high on Friday, reaching $2,564 per ounce and taking its quarter-to-date gain to 10%. Bitcoin, which is often compared to gold, has lost around 7% this quarter.

Most observers are of the opinion that idiosyncratic factors are responsible for the divergence in price performance, and the rally in the yellow metal suggests favorable macroeconomic conditions for the cryptocurrency ahead.

Gold's surge is linked to increased accumulation by central banks, a privilege bitcoin still lacks, which also suggests monetary policy easing ahead, according to Charlie Morris, founder of ByteTree.

"The strength in gold reflects increasing current and future [fiat] money supply, among other things, and bitcoin will rally when the economy picks up or when the sound of stimulus is heard," Morris said.

André Dragosch, head of research Europe at Bitwise, opined that gold's rally likely indicates a sharp slide in inflation-adjusted U.S. government bond yields ahead. The decline in so-called real yields typically has investors rotating money into riskier investments like bitcoin and technology stocks, as observed in 2020.

- Omkar Godbole