Bitcoin Price Rises, XRP Falls. Why Stablecoin Bill, Coinbase Matter for Cryptos. — Barrons.com

By Elsa OhlenBitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies were on the rise Friday as investors weighed a raft of factors affecting sentiment around digital assets.The price of the world's largest crypto, Bitcoin, is up 1.7% over the last 24 hours to $103,652, according to CoinDesk data. The coin slipped to close to $101,000 Thursday.According to technical analysts, it may be near a short-term correction but is still on an upward trend in the longer term.Altcoins Ether and Solana also rose, 2.5% and 0.3%, while Ripple's XRP fell 2.8%.Crypto enthusiasts are optimistic about the broader regulatory landscape under the Trump administration.A stablecoin bill — the Genius Act — is currently moving through Congress and it would regulate the coins pegged to a fiat currency which is largely perceived as a good thing for the industry. A Senate vote is expected to take place next week.On the flip side, the biggest crypto exchange in the U.S., Coinbase, was reported to be under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for possibly having misrepresented its user numbers.In response to the report by New York Times, Coinbase said: "this is a hold-over investigation from the prior administration about a metric we stopped reporting two and a half years ago, which was fully disclosed to the public," Barron's reported Thursday.Shares still fell 7% Thursday as the company also said it had been the victim of a data breach but that "the full impact of these events are not yet known."For now, optimism seems to outweigh pessimism for many crypto traders with most of the major price moving coins in the green Friday.Write to Elsa Ohlen at [email protected] content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.