The excitement around Coinbase’s direct listing appeared to be short-lived and bitcoin’s price movement appears to be stuck within the same range as a day ago when the big U.S. cryptocurrency exchange’s shares started trading on Nasdaq.
Coinbase shares (NASDAQ: COIN) soared to as high as $429.54 in its first hours of trading on Wednesday but closed at $328, below the initial opening price at $381.
The deflating passion was reflected Thursday in bitcoin’s spot trading activity: The daily spot trading volume from eight crypto exchanges tracked by CoinDesk dropped substantially, to below $2 billion, from near $5.5 billion on Wednesday.
Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz expressed his concerns about a broader market pullback to MarketWatch earlier Wednesday, adding that many “weird coins” have had huge volume spikes from retail traders.
Ether outperformed bitcoin Thursday on a percentage basis gain.
The center of attention for the No. 2 cryptocurrency by market capitalization was Ethereum’s Berlin hard fork. It went live early Thursday.
Since the upgrade, a consensus bug was found with the Open Ethereum client, which disrupted block production. Coinbase disabled ETH and ERC-20 withdrawals on both Coinbase and Coinbase Pro.
In the derivatives market, open interest in ether’s options market rose to a record $3.3 billion Wednesday. The cryptocurrency’s one-month implied volatility (IV) remained low, meaning that investors expect lower odds of price turbulence in the next month.
Other digital assets on the CoinDesk 20 are mostly higher Thursday. Notable winners as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET):
There were no notable losers as of 20:00 UTC.