The meme tokens are holding their gains even as Bitcoin sits around $25,000 and Ether hovers at about $2,000 amid optimism around its upgrade, known as Merge, now expected around September 15. Dogecoin is up about 14% over the past five days, while Shiba Inu has gained almost 40%, according to pricing data compiled by Bloomberg.
The crypto market has shown some signs of recovery with its total market cap at around $1.2 trillion now, after having dropped to around $875 billion as of June 19, according to data from CoinGecko.
Lower-than-expected inflation prints out of the US last week boosted hopes that the Federal Reserve might be able to ease off its pace of rate hikes, helping riskier assets like crypto. Ethereum has also been supported after a final test stage before the Merge upgrade which co-founder Vitalik Buterin estimates will occur around September 15.
The Merge represents a transition in how Ether tokens are minted and transactions are validated, away from mining blocks using complex computational puzzles under the proof-of-work method and toward proof-of-stake. Under the POS method, Ether holders can sign up to validate transactions on Ethereum based on stashes of locked up tokens.
Crypto struggled through the first half of the year as the Federal Reserve hiked rates to combat stubbornly high inflation, with the prices of Bitcoin, Ether and other tokens falling by more than 50%. Following the collapse of a major pair of tokens, some cryptocurrency lenders froze customer withdrawals, and several crypto firms have cut jobs. Prices have partly recovered, with bitcoin gaining 17% in July.
