Bitcoin (BTC) Price Crosses $61K as TON Rallies on GameFi Integration

BTC beat the CoinDesk 20 during the Asia trading hours, while traders remain bullish on TON because of its GameFi integration.

Bitcoin price rose above $61,000 on Wednesday morning in Asia, leading gains among major cryptocurrencies to recoup losses from a sharp price drop earlier in August.

Bitcoin gained over 3% in the past 24 hours, CoinGecko data showed, with ether (ETH), Solana’s SOL, Cardano’s ADA, XRP and BNB Chain’s BNB rising as much as 2.8%. Major memecoins dogecoin (DOGE) and shiba inu (SHIB) rose just 1%, showing sentiment was not in favor of riskier bets.

Gains in bitcoin outpaced the 2.45% rise in the broader CoinDesk 20 (CD20), a liquid index tracking the largest tokens by market capitalization, excluding stablecoins.

Despite the modest gains, some trading funds remained cautious ahead of a data-heavy week, warning of potential short-term tremors that could stall the ongoing rally.

“Investors remain cautious ahead of US CPI this week,” crypto trading firm QCP Capital noted in a Telegram broadcast. “They will be watching closely for inflation numbers to gauge whether the Fed will cut rates by 50 or 25 bps in September. The odds are now evenly split.”

Wednesday’s recovery helped chalk up gains for traders who nursed losses after a 20% market-wide drop earlier in August as the popular yen carry trade unwound. Some strategists warned of further losses related to the carry trade, stating its impact is not entirely over.

In an interview with CNBC earlier this week, Richard Kelly, head of global strategy at TD Securities, said he was “very hesitant” to declare the end of the carry trade unwind.

“I’d push back on a lot of those narratives. You don’t have any real data to price your carry trades that we know,” Kelly said in the CNBC interview. “I think there is still a lot that can unwind, especially if you look at how undervalued yen is.’

“That is going to change the valuations for the next one to two years to come. That’s going to have spillover effects,” he added.

The Bank of Japan (BOJ) raised rates for the first time in over a decade recently, unsettling global markets and risk assets, including bitcoin. When rates were low, traders borrowed yen cheaply to invest in another asset that provided a higher rate of return – creating the carry trade.

A bump in rates impacted the profitability of trading strategies, creating a ripple effect that hit nearly all markets. BTC fell 15% in a 24-hour period, one of its biggest drops in recent years, while major tokens slid at 22%.

Earlier in August, the deputy governor of the BOJ said that the central bank would refrain from raising rates amid volatile markets, impacting yen carry trades and risk assets.

A former BOJ official has since said the central bank would defer additional interest rate hikes to next year, suggesting a preference for market stability over the near term.

Toncoin’s TON rose 7% during Wednesday’s Asia trading session, according to CoinDesk Indices data. The growth of GameFi on the platform, as well as its close integration with Telegram, were cited by stakeholders in the Toncoin ecosystem as reasons for the token’s continued gains.

"The number of players of TON games break the ceiling glass of previous blockchain games by the viral social growth in Telegram. And some TON games have already verified the significant revenue from game play itself, not token selling," John Cheang, the TON Foundation's Asia-Pacific lead, said in an email interview, also pointing to TON's record-high blockchain transactions per seconds as a reason why it can scale.

Ben El-Baz, Managing Director of HashKey Global, which is an investor in TON-ecosystem projects like Catizen, added in an emailed comment that leveraging Telegram's advantage will "attract more developers represents a significant opportunity for TON."

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