Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed local lows of $57,340 hitting during Tuesday after another failed attempt at tackling $60,000 resistance.
Despite being a matter of thousands of dollars away from all-time highs of $61,700, BTC/USD has been unable to drive sellers away for good. While thinning out, the last band of resistance has remained in place.
This slowdown in the 2020-2021 bull market has alarmed some, but professional analysts remain steadfast in their optimistic appraisals of the largest cryptocurrency.
Among them is Bloomberg Intelligence, which on Tuesday predicted that Q2 was more likely to deliver a further surge to $80,000 than a capitulatory move to $40,000.
“Adoption of the benchmark crypto as a global reserve asset has crossed the mainstream threshold, as we see it, and the market tide is rising. This scenario has switched the focal point of our 2021 analysis toward more-technical indicators from a wider range of fundamental and on-chain metrics in the past few years,” a new report reads.
“A more likely 2Q scenario is to breach $60,000 resistance and head toward $80,000. A backup toward $40,000 support is less likely, in our view.”
Bloomberg senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone, who authored the report, is well known as a Bitcoin bull, and his perspective chimes with that of various analytics resources coming out with their own reasons to be confident in the market.
Continuing, he noted that in terms of a reserve asset, Bitcoin is usurping ground which used to be reserved for gold. The precious metal “will always have a place in jewelry and coin collections,” he argued, “but most indicators point to an accelerating pace of Bitcoin replacing the metal as a store of value in investor portfolios.”
“Bitcoin’s fundamental and technical underpinnings are improving while gold’s deteriorate,” the report summarized.
Altcoin wake-up call sees gain
Meanwhile, altcoins had even more to celebrate than the average Bitcoin investor on the day as large-cap cryptocurrencies added to strong weekly growth.
Among them was Ether (ETH), fresh from new all-time highs around $2,150, and XRP, which broke the $1 barrier for the first time since 2018 before correcting.
Binance Coin, (BNB), the second-largest altcoin by market cap, gained 3.4% to hit $388, sealing weekly gains of over 33%.
“Large Cap Altcoins are waking up,” popular Twitter trader Rekt Capital announced.
An accompanying graphic suggested that smaller altcoins would feel the benefit once larger coins had outperformed. As Cointelegraph reported, altcoins traditionally do best once Bitcoin has spent a suitable length of time consolidating after a bull run.
Bitcoin market cap dominance stood at 55.1% on the day, its lowest since May 2019.
Cryptocurrency market cap dominance chart. Source: CoinMarketCap
Dogecoin, CryptoCurrency Reddit communities surge as crypto euphoria heats up
Published
21 mins ago
on
April 18, 2021
By
With much of the market fixated on Bitcoin’s (BTC) sudden price correction over the weekend, retail interest in digital assets appears to be on the rise, according to the latest statistics from Reddit.
The r/dogecoin community added 145,859 weekly subscribers, according to Subreddit Stats. The gains are hardly surprising given DOGE’s dramatic rally over the past week. The meme-based cryptocurrency skyrocketed 400% during that period, bringing its yearly returns to an eye-watering 5,000%.
DOGE’s parabolic rally moderated over the weekend, with social media sentiment data from The TIE and Cointelegraph indicating more pain in the short term. That’s because price action is often correlated with social media engagement; a decline in the latter is sometimes a precursor to bearish price action in the near term.
Meanwhile, the r/CryptoCurrency community, which is devoted to all things digital assets, added 86,838 new subscribers during the week. New community members were welcomed by platinum award recipient “mirza1h” on Sunday. In a subreddit post, miraza1h said:
“Past week has been insane in the crypto world, so naturally things here weren’t like they normally are. Your curious posts/comments may have been ignored a bit. In the weekend things are a bit more chill, so feel free to ask us anything you want.
The user also introduced new subreddit followers to Moon, the native token of the r/CryptoCurrency community.
Much like DOGE, the overall cryptocurrency market limped into Sunday’s session, having declined by a cumulative $386 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. The digital-asset market cap briefly fell below $1.9 trillion before recovering to around $2 trillion.
Massive shakeouts are nothing new for seasoned cryptocurrency investors. Even during bull markets, declines of 20% or more are fairly common, especially after major rallies. Speculation about an abrupt decline in Bitcoin’s hash power and the possibility of U.S. regulatory action against crypto-friendly banks may have contributed to the decline on Sunday.
Even with the latest decline, the cryptocurrency market is still double the size it was in January when it first crossed the $1 trillion milestone.
Peak fear? Bitcoin funding rates crash to lowest levels in 7 months
Published
3 hours ago
on
April 18, 2021
By
The funding rate of Bitcoin (BTC) has dropped to levels not seen since September 2020 as the price of Bitcoin plummeted below $52,000 on April 18. Quant trader and analyst Lex Moskovski says it shows fear has returned to the market.
According to the data from Glassnode, the average Bitcoin futures funding rate across all exchange dropped to as low as around -0.03% on Sunday
What is funding rate and why does it dropping matter?
Bitcoin futures exchanges use a mechanism called “funding” to achieve balance in the market.
The way the mechanism works is simple: if there are more longs or buyers in the market, the funding rate rises, and vice versa.
As such, when the funding rate turns negative, it means the majority of the market is short-selling Bitcoin, indicating fear in the market.
Earlier this week, Bitcoin was hovering at around $64,000 in anticipation of the Coinbase public listing. At the lowest point of the day on April 18, BTC dropped to as low as $50,000.
From the day’s highest to lowest point, the price of Bitcoin dropped by almost 15% against the U.S. dollar.
The market sentiment can change so quickly because many traders use high leverage across major exchanges.
During the Coinbase public listing week, the funding rate of Bitcoin was stable at 0.1% to 0.15% on top futures exchanges like Binance and Bybit.
This shows that many traders were aggressively longing or buying Bitcoin, making the futures market incredibly overheated.
When this happens, the incentive to short sell Bitcoin massively increases and it puts the market at risk of a big cascade of liquidations.
There has been speculation over the past 48 hours that the abrupt drop in the hash rate of the Bitcoin blockchain network led to the price drop.
On April 16, major Chinese mining facilities and pools saw outages after China’s Xinjiang region experienced blackouts.
Consequently, the hash rate of Bitcoin dropped quickly thereafter, leading to concerns that it would hinder the market sentiment around BTC.
However, Adam Cochran, a partner at Cinneanhaim Ventures, said that the Bitcoin hash rate dip likely did not cause the price of BTC to drop. He said:
“The idea that a power outage last night in a mining region in China led to the dip in $BTC is utter nonsense, just like the spurious correlation graphs above. But even worse, when you run the math *there is no correlation* If someone is confident in a correlation and has enough data to make a graph, ask them for the receipts. If they have no idea how to run a regression test, then they don’t actually know if its correlated or not.”
If the Bitcoin price drop was not caused by fundamental factors but rather was purely technical as a result of an overcrowded futures market, the case for a swift recovery strengthens.
In the short term, it is favorable for Bitcoin to remain at around the $56,000 support area, as the futures market finds composure and the funding rates stabilize.