BTC/USD: Bitcoin Tops $117,000 but the Big Winners Are Two Altcoins. XRP and Solana Blast Off.

Altcoin season apparently comes and goes. Post-Fed push higher was led by XRP and Solana, while Bitcoin and Ethereum were largely sitting it out.

👀 Bitcoin Ain’t the Thunder

• Bitcoin prices BTCUSD pushed slightly higher Friday morning, advancing above the $117,000 level for the first time in one month. The flagship crypto’s upside swing was a blip compared with what some alternatives tokens did.
• It’s the aftermath of the Federal Reserve’s decision to loosen up monetary conditions by reducing the benchmark interest rate. In other words, let’s jump straight back into risk assets – there’s Bitcoin, there’s Ethereum, and then there’s a bunch of alternatives carrying the most risk.
• The spotlight this week went to XRP and Solana, because, on the one hand, they’re smaller and suggest bigger fluctuations in both directions. But on the other hand, there’s the big anticipation that they’ll soon get their own exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

🚀 XRP, Solana Take the Lead

• Friday morning, a single XRP coin (XRP/USD) was going for about $3.05, up some 2% on the day and more than 36% over the past three months. Solana SOLUSD did even better, adding 3% to briefly top $250, taking its three-month gains to nearly 60%.
• Ethereum ETHUSD was hugging the flatline for the session but it was flexing the most gains in the longer term. Spanning back three months, the second-largest token is up 83% to trade above $4,500. Late in August, the Buterin-founded crypto jumped to a record high of almost $5,000.
• And Bitcoin? The orange coin is up a mere 9% for the quarter so far, suggesting that the big money is going into alternative plays. After all, it had its moment in the previous quarter when it added roughly 32% to its valuation. It’s been smooth sailing since.

💸 Alternative Assets’ Time

• Alternatives tend to do well after a big run-up in Bitcoin prices. The reasoning behind is that once Bitcoin gets to a certain level where demand dries up, traders take their profits and jam them into coins that’ve been sitting unchanged for weeks or months (sleeping giants?).
• The current altcoin rally could be the result of crypto investors pivoting toward higher-risk assets now that liquidity conditions got looser thanks to the Fed’s rate cut.
• Stocks are currently at record highs. Bitcoin notched an ATH a few weeks back. Solana is about $40 away from its record set back in January. And XRP’s record hit in July is at $3.66 a token, or 20% away.