Bitcoin and ether prices fell slightly while meme tokens saw significant gains.
The surge in meme coins such as shiba inu, was probably driven by Asia-based traders and linked to the excitement around the potential for a pro-crypto shift by U.S. regulators.

Bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) prices fell a little more than 1% in the past 24 hours as crypto markets remained mostly muted after last week's rally.

With major tokens such as Solana's SOL, XRP and BNB Chain's BNB little changed, the meme coin sector drove the biggest gains for traders among categories tracked by CoinGecko, including shiba inu (SHIB) climbing as much as 12%. The broad-based CoinDesk 20 (CD20), an index of the largest tokens that omits stablecoins, lost 0.5%.

A surge in dogecoin (DOGE) and SHIB started during European afternoon hours Tuesday as stocks of videogame retailer GameStop (GME) rose up 19% in premarket trading, a signal that has historically led to gains in meme tokens.

"Popular memes are running primarily due to Asian traders entering the market again - most tend to see their prices rise most significantly during Asian trading hours, during the middle of the night US time," Rennick Palley, founding partner at crypto fund Stratos, said in an emailed statement.

"This is a follow-on effect to excitement around the ETH ETF and US regulatory shift to becoming more pro-crypto," Palley added.

As previously reported, meme tokens such as pepe (PEPE) and mog (MOG) have rocketed as much as 100% in the past week as a beta bet on the Ethereum ecosystem. This is on the back of U.S. listing approvals for a spot ether exchange-traded fund (ETF).

Bitcoin, meantime, remains in a bearish trading range despite recent volatility, according to FxPro senior market analyst Alex Kuptsikevich.

"A clear exit and daily close above $70,000 will break this bearish pattern. Until then, the classic development is a pullback to the lower range at around $68,000," he said in a Telegram interview.

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Shaurya Malwa

Shaurya is the Co-Leader of the CoinDesk tokens and data team in Asia with a focus on crypto derivatives, DeFi, market microstructure, and protocol analysis. Shaurya holds over $1,000 in BTC, ETH, SOL, AVAX, SUSHI, CRV, NEAR, YFI, YFII, SHIB, DOGE, USDT, USDC, BNB, MANA, MLN, LINK, XMR, ALGO, VET, CAKE, AAVE, COMP, ROOK, TRX, SNX, RUNE, FTM, ZIL, KSM, ENJ, CKB, JOE, GHST, PERP, BTRFLY, OHM, BANANA, ROME, BURGER, SPIRIT, and ORCA. He provides over $1,000 to liquidity pools on Compound, Curve, SushiSwap, PancakeSwap, BurgerSwap, Orca, AnySwap, SpiritSwap, Rook Protocol, Yearn Finance, Synthetix, Harvest, Redacted Cartel, OlympusDAO, Rome, Trader Joe, and SUN.