Bitcoin prices rose on Thursday morning in Asia, while Ether edged down. The other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies by market capitalization gained. Polygon’s Matic led the winners after it said transaction volume on its zero knowledge scaling solution hit a record high. U.S. equity futures were little changed after a solid rally in regular trading on Wednesday as progress was reported in talks to raise the U.S. debt ceiling to avoid a default.

Bitcoin gains with altcoins

Bitcoin rose 1.37% to US$27,404.88 in the 24 hours to 8:00 a.m. in Hong Kong, but lost 0.78% over the last seven days according to CoinMarketCap data. Ether edged down 0.1% to US$1,822.26, while posting a 1.10% weekly loss.

Stablecoin issuer Tether said Wednesday it will use as much as 15% of its net operating profit to purchase Bitcoin from this month. Meantime, lawmakers in the UK said the same day that Bitcoin, Ether and other cryptocurrencies should be regulated as gambling rather than as financial services.

The other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies traded higher. Polygon’s Matic led gainers with a rise of 4.92% to US$0.8875. It recorded a weekly gain of 1.16%.

Polygon said on Twitter Wednesday that the transaction volume on Polygon zkEVM — a zero knowledge scaling solution to the Ethereum Virtual Machine — hit an all time high of over 13,000 last Sunday. Polygon also said the scaling solution saw 70% growth in total value locked last week, its largest week-on-week gain to date.

Litecoin added 4.49% to US$93.9, extending its weekly gain of 15.83%. The Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency has seen a surge in recent interest due to the congestion and higher transaction fees on the Bitcoin network. 

The total crypto market capitalization rose 1.04% in the past 24 hours to US$1.14 trillion. Total trading volume gained 20.38% to US$34.34 billion.