Bitcoin started Friday with a sharp jump to the upside, by the time of writing, its value was balanced at around $20,998.

The price of the cryptocurrency remained almost unchanged on Thursday, the coin closed the day at $19,400. According to the website for tracking the price of virtual assets CoinMarketCap, over the past day, the lowest value of bitcoin reached $19,076. At the same time, following the results of the past week, BTC lost 0.24%.

The main reason for the steady growth of the first cryptocurrency on Friday, experts call the results of the European Central Bank on monetary policy on Thursday.

So, on Thursday, the central bank raised the base rate on loans to 1.25% per annum, the rate on deposits - up to 0.75%, and the rate on margin loans - up to 1.5%. At the same time, the increase in the discount rate immediately by 0.75 percentage points took place for the first time in history.

In addition, members of the central bank noted that the central bank intends to continue raising the rate in the upcoming meetings. Thus, ECB President Christine Lagarde said that further rates of increase in interest rates will depend on the incoming statistical data.

An additional factor supporting the BTC was the strong results of Thursday's trading session on the US stock market. So, on Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.61%, the S&P 500 rose 0.66%, and the NASDAQ Composite rose 0.60%.

By the way, since the beginning of 2022, analysts have increasingly begun to emphasize the high level of correlation between the US securities market and virtual assets amid intense anticipation by both of the consequences of the geopolitical conflict in Eastern Europe and further steps by the US Federal Reserve.

Earlier, analysts from the investment company Arcane Research have already stated that the correlation of BTC and technology securities has reached its highest since July 2020.

Such close parallels of bitcoin with US stocks, in particular with the NASDAQ index, make investors increasingly doubt the ability of cryptocurrency to become a hedge against inflation.

Altcoin market

Ethereum, the main competitor of bitcoin, also began the Friday trading session with a confident rise and by the time of writing the material had reached $1,678. Over the past day, altcoin quotes soared by 3.7%.

The roller coaster of Ethereum prices in recent days, crypto experts explain with the restless expectation of the approaching migration of ETH from energy-intensive PoW to a more environmentally friendly Proof-of-Stake algorithm. The long-awaited event is scheduled for the period from 10 to 20 September.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin claims that the transition of the network to Proof-of-Stake will increase the popularity of digital assets for everyday payments by reducing the fee to 2 cents. According to the Canadian-Russian programmer, the popularity of crypto payments has fallen after 2018 amid high transaction fees.

At the same time, many members of the crypto community fear that the technical problems associated with the migration of Ethereum to PoS could provoke a loud drop in the second largest virtual asset by capitalization. In turn, the collapse of ETH can put serious pressure on the global cryptocurrency market.

As for cryptocurrencies from the top 10 by capitalization, over the past 24 hours, almost all coins showed spectacular positive dynamics. At the same time, Solana (+7.23%) had the highest daily results.

Within the framework of the past week, among the ten strongest cryptocurrencies, the best results were also recorded for the Solana coin (+9.98%).

According to CoinGecko, the world's largest virtual asset data aggregator, over the past 24 hours, among the top 100 most capitalized digital assets, the list of leaders was headed by the Rocket Pool coin (+18.3%), and the first place in the drop list went to Helium (-9.2 %).

According to the results of the past week, in the top hundred of the strongest digital assets, the best results were shown by the Terra Luna Classic coin (+98.6%), and the worst by Chain (-14.5%).