Bitcoin Circles $10,400 as Altcoins Rally, XRP Posts 10% Gains

Sunday, Aug. 18 - Crypto markets are seeing a strong surge of green, with altcoins posting the strongest gains and Bitcoin circling the $10,400 mark.

While still roughly $1,000 short of its price point at the start of its 7-day chart, , today's recovery has kept the top coin comfortably above the $10,000 psychological price point.

Top altcoin Ether has posted a strong gain of over 7% and is trading around $197 by press time.

Having dropped below the $200 mark on Aug. 14, Ether's fresh gains are now edging it back above this threshold.

XRP is seeing an even more bullish 10% gain on the day, and is posting a milder 5% loss on its seven-day chart.

Among the remaining top ten coins several alts are seeing solid upward momentum: Litecoin is up 6.5% on the day, EOS is up 6% and Bitcoin Cash is up 5.7%. Widening out to the top twenty, alts are performing strongly across the board.

Chainlink is seeing a close to 7% gain on the day, with Stellar up close to 5.6%. Dash, Tezos, NEO and IOTA are all posting gains of 3.5-5%. Total market capitalization for all cryptocurrencies is at $267,390,988,350 at press time, according to Coin360 data.

If finalized, the prospective integration would see the NEO blockchain benefit from Celer's solution for faster off-chain transactions for payments as well as generalized off-chain smart contracts.

As the alts spearhead today's market recovery, the community continues to scrutinize the flows of ill-gotten proceeds from the $2.9 billion crypto investment heist PlusToken.

"We could see another plunge in rates. We could see further movement down in yields and the yield curve and more volatility and problems in the markets. He [Powell] should move aggressively,".