Bitcoin held weekend gains to move toward US$22,000 in Monday morning trading in Asia, while other tokens in the top 10 by market capitalization were flat to lower. Ether slipped, along with Polkadot and XRP.

See related article: Markets: Bitcoin, Ether little changed; Polkadot leaps Dogecoin into crypto top ten

Fast facts

• Bitcoin rose 0.3% in the past 24 hours to trade at US$21,690 at 8 a.m. in Hong Kong, while Ethereum lost 0.8% to US$1,762, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
  

• Ethereum has out-performed Bitcoin over the past three months — gaining nearly 50% compared to Bitcoin’s loss of 2% over that time frame — amid growing interest in Ethereum’s long-awaited network “Merge” that is expected to take place in the middle of this week.
  

• Polkadot led the losses in CoinMarketCap’s top 10, falling 1.11% to US$7.70, while XRP dropped 0.7% to US$0.35.
  

• The governance token of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) ecosystem, ApeCoin, was up 11% to its highest price in over three weeks, trading at US$5.64. Three of the top six highest-selling non-fungible token (NFT) collections in the past 24 hours are associated projects of the BAYC, according to CryptoSlam.
  

• U.S. equities rose on Friday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 1.2% higher, the S&P 500 was up 1.5%, while the Nasdaq Composite Index finished the day with a 2.1% gain. Investors await the release of August’s Consumer Price Index data on Tuesday as an indication of how effective the Federal Reserve’s attempts to tackle inflation have been, and what the central bank may do next.
  

• “Based on what I know today, I support a significant increase at our next meeting,” Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller told the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austria on Friday. The Fed is next scheduled to meet on Sept. 20-21, where investors expect it to raise interest rates by 75-basis-points from its current range of 2.25%-2.5%.

See related article: Ethereum Merge’s Impact on NFTs