Bitcoin (BTC) ended up disappointing the market on Wednesday by rounding the session off 1.2% lower, dragging the BTC/USDT pair below US$23,000 once again.
Losses have continued to pile up this morning, with another percent shaved from the pair, suggesting that Tuesday’s post-Powell rally may have been the short-term exception to the rule.
We can see buyers’ support gathering at US$22,700 per the Binance order book, which could help stem further losses.
Bitcoin bulls surely need to keep the benchmark cryptocurrency comfortably above US$23,000 in order to rally market confidence, but it is undoubtedly proving tough.
Partially this is due to a doggedly determined US Dollar Index (DXY) which has seen some relief lately after crashing pretty consistently since September 2022’s astronomical highs.
If a rally fails to materialise, it will put to bed the long-held ‘golden cross’ theory that hypothesises a bull market whenever bitcoin’s 50-day moving average price moves above its 200-day moving average.
Investors have been waiting with bated breath ever since we saw a golden cross a few days back. It’s yet to happen, but perhaps this is the bears’ last hurrah before bitcoin shoots up to a fresh all-time high. Just don’t hold your breath.
Bitcoin (BTC) posts losses in seven of the past eight days – Source: currency.com
Ethereum continues to outperform bitcoin, with the ETH/BTC pair now more than 5% higher month to date.
A lot of this has to do with ether’s post-Merge tokenomics, which has seen the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation become deflationary.
In the altcoin space
Polygon (MATIC) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) continue to be the best-performing altcoins in the top-20 set, with both managing to sustain week-on-week gains in the double digits.
Further down the board, oracle network Chainlink (LINK) and the OKB network token have also outperformed the market lately.
In the decentralised finance (DeFi) space, staking protocol Lido DAO (LOD) surged another 8% overnight, bringing weekly gains close to 20%.
Staking has been in the headlines recently due to hybrid exchange Robinhood’s announcement that UK and European customers will soon be able to earn staking yields in-app.
At the same time, rumours of a regulatory ban on staking in the US are emerging. Watch this space!
Global cryptocurrency market capitalisation currently sits at US$1.06tn, having dipped 2% overnight, while total value locked across all DeFi protocols dipped 1.8% to US$48.8bn.
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