This Week in Coins: Bitcoin Continues Surge, Meme Coin Mania on Legendary Investor’s Death

It’s been another eventful week in the crypto sphere.

Bitcoin continued to hit highs not seen since the digital asset crash of May 2022: the biggest virtual coin touched $39,000 Friday before dropping down again.

It is now trading for $38,806 per coin, according to CoinGecko. That’s a 24-hour rise of about 1%. Over the week, it’s up by 3%.

The reason for the asset’s surge was likely in part due to a dovish forecast from the Federal Reserve: governor Christopher J. Waller said Tuesday that although inflation was still high in the U.S., he was “increasingly confident that policy is currently well positioned to slow the economy and get inflation back to 2 percent.”

Since the Fed started aggressively raising interest rates last year, investors have typically avoided “risk-on” assets like tech stocks and crypto.

Waller’s comments, according to James Butterfill, head of research at the European digital asset manager CoinShares, “favorably influenced” Bitcoin’s prices.

Elsewhere, obscure meme coins experienced a surge of interest—and not necessarily for the right reasons.

Former Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger died earlier in the week. The legendary investor famously bashed Bitcoin. After his passing, an Ethereum-based token, MUNGER, started trading.

It soared by a whopping 31,000% before crashing.

And after divisive diplomat and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday, a number of Ethereum-based coins minted in his honor shot up in price.

As if that wasn’t enough, on Friday, following news that Tesla CEO and X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk had told companies like Apple, IBM, and Ubisoft to “go fuck yourself” in an interview, many meme coins based around his comments started to trade.

The world’s richest man is no stranger to the bizarre world of meme coins (volatile cryptocurrencies that are based on Internet jokes and trends): Musk used to openly back Dogecoin, the original meme coin and the 10th biggest digital asset.

Incidentally, Dogecoin is now trading for $0.0842—and is the best-performing cryptocurrency over the week, having risen nearly 8% in seven days.

The entire crypto market cap right now stands at $1.52 trillion, a 1.2% jump over the past day.