Bitcoin (BTC) has continued to show signs of consolidation around the $28,000 price point in a promising sign that the impressive gains made during the recent period of financial turmoil may prove sticky.
BTC/USDT rallied close to 2% over the weekend after closing 3% lower on Friday. At the time of writing, the pair had fallen back 0.7% to USD 27,750.
The past few weeks have been quite chaotic, not only for crypto, but for the wider financial sector, with numerous bank collapses in the US and Credit Suisse’s takeover of rival UBS.
Interest rate rises across the UK, EU and US have also sown uncertainty, but things have clearly started to calm down in the markets.
To that end, the safe-haven rally we’ve seen in physical gold and bitcoin should be expected to level off as well.
A marked decline in long and short futures liquidations appears to bear witness to this point – on Sunday combined liquidations totaled US$18 million compared to US$100 million plus at the height of the turmoil.
Bitcoin may experience some downward price pressure depending on the level of profit taking, although buying support around 27k per Binance’s order book may act as a bottleneck.
Tensions between Coinbase and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) should also not be ignored.
The Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange received a Wells notice from the regulator on Thursday last week, typically a sign of impending enforcement.
Bitcoin products are unlikely to be affected by any enforcement, but it could add an extra layer of uncertainty to the markets anyway.
Bitcoin’s risk-on rally flattens – Source: currency.com
Ethereum (ETH) rallied around 1.3% over the weekend, but has since relinquished most of those gains this Monday morning. The ETH/USDT pair is currently trading at US$1,750.
In the altcoin space
Ripple (XRP) remains high above the rest of the top-20 altcoin set, and is now over 20% higher week-on-week.
The payment token’s stellar performance coincides with renewed hopes for a big win in the long-running SEC vs. The Ripple Labs dispute over unregistered securities.
Ripple President Monica Long told CNBC last week that she is “very hopeful” of achieving a victory; that simple statement was apparently enough to galvanize the XRP bulls.
Litecoin (LTC), which has a similar profile to XRP as a payment token, has also risen by over 10% in the past seven days.
Overnight top 100 clubs include ssv.network (SSV), Rocket Pool (RPL) and Neo (NEO).
Global cryptocurrency market capitalization rose 0.3% to $1.16 billion overnight, while the total value of the decentralized finance space (Defi) remained unchanged at $49.1 billion.
