Bitcoin (BTC) saw a spark of volatility in late Tuesday trades, with the BTC/USDT pair bouncing off the US$25,300 support line following a day of bearish price action.
The world’s largest cryptocurrency stabilised above US$26,000 overnight and is currently swapping for US$26,040 at the time of writing.
Long-bitcoin liquidations still dominated the futures market though, with US$19 million worth of long bets wiped out against US$6.3 million of short bets.
Despite still being 10% lower week on week, this price action bodes well for investors banking against further losses on the spot bitcoin market.
Binance’s order book shows a strong support level at US$25,800.
Bitcoin finds support – Source: currency.com
European bitcoin funds enjoy solid inflows
As reported in the Financial Times, European bitcoin exchange-traded funds have seen significant inflows since June, when BlackRock (NYSE:BLK) amped up its spot-bitcoin ETF campaign.
Europe-domiciled bitcoin ETFs added €150 million (£128 million) in June, making it the best month since March 2022, per Morningstar data.
“The mere announcement of BlackRock’s desire to initiate a bitcoin ETF has already bolstered confidence, with the implicit signal that the world’s largest asset manager endorses bitcoin,” said James Butterfill at CoinShares.
Despite the perceived boost in confidence, US regulators have yet to signal whether they will follow Europe and Canada’s footsteps in approving spot-bitcoin ETFs, even though futures-based bitcoin ETFs have already been given the green light.
In the midst of the ETF hype, an unknown bitcoin whale has surged to the number three spot in the bitcoin rich list, behind only Binance and Bitfinex.
Some market observers have theorised that the whale wallet belongs to BlackRock, Gemini or another financial institution gunning for approval of their spot bitcoin ETF.
Gemini has transferred bitcoins to the new address bc1q....59v2 in the past 3 months. It currently holds 118,000 bitcoins, or about 3.08 billion U.S. dollars. It is currently the third largest bitcoin holder. The first and second largest Bitcoin addresses are Binance Cold Wallet…— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) August 22, 2023
Whatever the outcome of the spot bitcoin tussle, speculation has likely fended off further losses for the benchmark cryptocurrency in the short term.
Ethereum (ETH), the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, bounced of Tuesday’s intraday low of US$1,580, recovering to US$1,645 at the time of writing.
There is little to celebrate in the altcoin space, with most of the top-20 set firmly in the red.
Ripple (XRP), Solana (SOL), Polygon (MATIC), Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Litecoin (LTC) have all racked up double-digit losses on a week-on-week basis, with only Tron (TRX) in the green with 0.5% of gains.
Global cryptocurrency market cap recovered slightly overnight, adding 0.13% to US$1.05 trillion. Bitcoin currently comprises 49.2% of the entire market.
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