Investing.com - Bitcoin surged over 10% to test $8,000 on Tuesday morning in Asia and other major digital coins also made significant gains amid bullish sentiment.
Bitcoin traded 11.45% higher to $7,949.9 by 11:52 PM ET (03:52 AM GMT). The digital coin reached above $8,000 twice on early Tuesday morning. Over the past 7 days, Bitcoin has gained 34.62%, marking its strongest momentum this year.
Ethereum rose 8.46% to $210.22, XRP was up 11.53% to $0.37254, and Litecoin added 5.30% to $91.61.
The total market cap rose to $234.4 billion from $190.4 billion last Friday.
Valerie Szczepanik, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Advisor for Digital Assets and Innovation, again came into the limelight among the crypto investors with her remarks on initial exchange offering (IEO).
On May 13, Szczepanik said there could be regulatory hurdles for platforms that seek to list IEO tokens for a fee since they are likely to be engaging in broker-dealer activity.
“If they are not registered they will find themselves in trouble in the U.S., if they have a U.S. issuer or U.S. buyers, if they are operating on the U.S. market,” she said.
Following the remark, Szczepanik mentioned cryptocurrency broker-dealer TokenLot. “This was a platform that was assisting to bring buyers to ICOs… In that case, there was an enforcement action charging the platform with acting as a unregistered broker-dealer and participating in the distribution in violation of the registration provisions,” she added.
In other news, Germany is to introduce blockchain bond regulations that will allow bonds to be issued as virtual tokens on a blockchain, according to local daily business news outlet Handelsblatt.
“We consider it to be of paramount importance that we bring blockchain technology forward for Germany, specifically in 2019,” Thomas Heilmann, the German government’s blockchain correspondent, told Handelsblatt.
Another news that attracted attention was crypto exchange Binance plans to fully resume deposits and withdrawals on Tuesday after suffering a hack last week.
“Our team is making progress and has been working through the weekend. In the past few days, we have made some significant overhauls to our system, with a large number of advanced security features added and/or completely re-architected. We will share details on some of the changes later,” the crypto exchange said in a statement.
On May 7, Binance lost around 7,070 Bitcoins from its hot wallets, which were worth over $40 million at the time.