First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Clings to $26K as Investors Await Powell’s Speech

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Bitcoin is clinging on to the $26,000 level as investors await the highly anticipated speech from the U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell at Jackson Hole later this morning. Other attendees include European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde who will speak later in the day. Investors will watch the speech closely in search of signals about monetary policy outlook. Bank of America said in a research note that it doesn't expect strong policy signals to come from this year’s event. Both bitcoin and ether traded lower ahead of the event, with bitcoin down 1.5% and ether down 1% over the last 24 hours. Altcoins were mostly trading in the red, with Lido DAO’s LDO token taking the largest daily hit of a 6% loss.

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has contacted some crypto projects with low-liquidity tokens in what it said was a move to "enhance their liquidity protection." "Over the past week, our team reached out to a small number of projects that issue digital assets listed on our platform as part of our ongoing risk management initiative," a spokesperson told CoinDesk by email. "These projects have relatively lower market liquidity trading pairs and/or a smaller market capitalization, which potentially exposes users to risk, including potential market manipulation." The exchange has asked for details about the projects' market makers and whether they would consider contributing up to 5% of their circulating tokens to Binance’s saving pools in return for interest, according to The Block, which reported the news earlier. Similar requests are shown in unverified screenshots posted on X, the social medium platform formerly known as Twitter.

Stablecoin issuer Num Finance has rolled out a Colombian peso-pegged token on the Polygon network, the company said in a press release on Thursday. Named nCOP, the token is overcollateralized by reserve assets and allows people and businesses to transfer, pay, earn and save money using blockchain rails, the press release said. The new offering arrives as stablecoins, a roughly $124 billion subset of digital assets, are increasingly in demand in emerging regions with frail financial systems such as Latin America and Turkey. People also use these cryptocurrencies to send remittances and store value, according to a report by crypto research firm Chainalysis. "Currently, Colombia is one of the main recipients of remittances in Latin America, with nearly USD 10 billion flowing into the country," Agustín Liserra, CEO of Num Finance, said in a statement. "Num Finance aims to provide a new possibility for people to send and receive nCOP as remittances and receive a yield on it."