The cryptocurrency markets halted their mid-week slide on Friday, with most coins achieving minor advances after enduring significant retraces over the previous two days. The Bitcoin price headlined the advance with a march back above $10,000, while Ethereum outperformed the index by a considerable margin.
Altogether, the cryptocurrency market cap rose about 1.3 percent for the day. At its present value of $462.7 billion, the market is in an excellent position to challenge the $500 billion threshold over the weekend.
The minor recovery enabled the Bitcoin price to climb back above the psychologically-important $10,000 barrier after briefly slipping below it on Thursday. At present, Bitcoin is valued at $10,199 on Bitfinex, which represents a single-day increase of about 0.4 percent but a six percent increase from its intraday low of $9,583. Bitcoin now has a $174.1 billion market cap, which sets its market share at 38.5 percent.
The moderate recovery is potentially linked to the news that stock trading app Robinhood had begun rolling out its cryptocurrency trading service, which was first announced in January.
The service is currently only available to a limited number of users in five US states, but the company intends to quickly expand this in the coming months. Investors are largely bullish on the fact that most of Robinhood’s 4 million registered users will soon have the ability to trade Bitcoin and Ethereum — with more cryptocurrencies likely to follow.
Although Bitcoin managed to recover back to a psychologically-important checkpoint, it was unable to advance much further. The Ethereum price, on the other hand, achieved an index-best six percent rally, raising its value to $867 on Bitfinex. Ethereum’s market cap is now valued at $85.5 billion, placing its share of the index just a few points below 20 percent.
The remaining large-cap altcoins achieved a mixed advance, with most cryptocurrencies remaining close to the index.
The Ripple price and Bitcoin Cash price each rose two percent and are currently trading at $0.95 and $1,272, respectively. Litecoin and Cardano, meanwhile, largely held steady at their previous-day levels.
The EOS price rose four percent, trailing only Ethereum among top 10-cryptocurrencies, and NEO’s one percent increase tracked the index.
Stellar, the ninth-largest cryptocurrency, posted a single-day decline of one percent, reducing its price to $0.36, while IOTA rounded out the top 10 with a two percent increase to $1.75.