First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Ends the Week in Muted Mood

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Following a surge to 20-month highs last week, bitcoin appears to have settled into a new range, trading between $42,000 and just over $43,000 for much of this week. The largest cryptocurrency is currently priced at around $42,600, down 0.65% in the last 24 hours. The CoinDesk Market Index (CMI), which offers a weighted view of the digital asset market at large, is down a similar amount. With a large degree of spot BTC ETF enthusiasm already priced into asset prices and with no decision on the approval of applications to list such a fund by the SEC expected until the new year, the crypto market is showing signs of ticking along sideways for the remainder of 2023.

Sales of Solana's smartphone are surging thanks to an airdrop of 30 million BONK tokens available to owners of the previously struggling Saga phone. "Saga sales have >10x'd in the past 48 hours, and are now on track to sell out before the new year," Solana co-founder Raj Gokal tweeted Thursday. The surge is so pronounced that Gokal's counterpart, Anatoly Yakovenko, tweeted they needed to raise the price. BONK, Solana's equivalent of dog-themed meme coin dogecoin, can seemingly take the credit for the turnaround in Saga's fortunes, with users saying on the Discord servers that they had just bought the phone to take advantage of the airdrop.

Crypto custody firm Qredo's crypto exchange Ankex has closed its doors. CEO Michael Moro, formerly of Genesis Trading, has already moved on. Ankex sought to combine a non-custodial DeFi approach with elements familiar to professional traders such as a central limit order book, earlier this year, but its "development has been paused," the exchange said in a message to its community. "As some of you tested earlier this year, Ankex was ready for a public beta launch. Unfortunately, our path must pause at this stage." Ankex may have just been a victim of unfortunate timing as the crypto industry gradually emerges from a prolonged bear market