It has been a reasonably positive 24 hours of trade again for the crypto market and gains are being seen across the board this morning.
This has lifted the value of the entire market by almost 1% to US$211.6 billion according to Coin Market Cap.
Why are cryptocurrencies on the rise?
Bitcoin and its peers have had a strong start to the week after Fidelity announced the launch of Fidelity Digital Asset Services. The new business will handle cryptocurrency custody and trade execution for institutional investors.
The custody side of things is being seen as a major positive for institutional investors as wallet hacking has been a big concern.
And rightly so. According to CoinDesk's 2018 State of Blockchain Report, US$1.6 billion of cryptocurrency had been stolen as of the end of June and is unlikely to ever be returned.
Fidelity's custody service will go to great lengths to keep its customer's cryptocurrency safe.
According to CNBC, the service will include vaulted cold storage, which "involves taking the cryptocurrency offline, and multilevel physical and cyber controls, among other security protocols that have been created leveraging Fidelity's security principles from other parts of the business."
While this is a big positive, I'm not convinced institutional money will come flooding in until price manipulation concerns are tackled.
In light of this, I wouldn't be overly surprised if the market gave back these gains in the coming days and dropped back down to the US$200 billion support level again.
In the meantime, here is the state of play on the market this morning compared to 24 hours ago:
The Bitcoin (BTC) price is up 0.2% to US$6,582.06. This lifts Bitcoin's market capitalisation to US$114 billion.
The Ethereum (ETH) price is up 1.4% to US$209.29, giving ETH a market capitalisation of US$21.5 billion.
The Ripple (XRP) price has surged 6.1% to 46.68 U.S. cents. This has lifted the alt coin's market capitalisation to US$18.7 billion.
The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) price is 0.1% higher to US$456.92, giving the Bitcoin offshoot a market capitalisation of US$7.95 billion.
The EOS (EOS) price has pushed 0.3% higher to US$5.46. This gain means EOS now has a market capitalisation of just over US$4.9 billion.
Outside the top five things were equally positive. Stellar (XLM) rose 2.6%, Tether (USDT) climbed 0.4%, Cardano (ADA) pushed 2.4% higher, and Monero (XMR) is up 0.7%.
The only coin in the top ten in negative territory is Litecoin (LTC) with a 1.6% decline. It is unclear why Litecoin has underperformed its peers.
