Mooners and Shakers: Bitcoin has outperformed everything so far this year, notes Goldman Sachs

The overall crypto market fluctuates and shifts rapidly from foot to foot in anticipation of the next Fed decision, but Bitcoin is currently quite steady near US$28k. Of course, that can change with a little hat or a hardware wallet.

But Goldman Sachs is certainly prepared to acknowledge Bitcoin’s staying power right now.

The investment banking giant notes that BTC has outperformed IT stocks, Nasdaq 100, S&P 500, gold and many other major investments since the start of 2023.

This is in the form of year-to-date (YTD) and risk-adjusted returns, as you can see from the chart below.

In fact, Bitcoin has hardly put a foot wrong so far this year, with its price rising from USD 16,500 on January 1 to around USD 28,200 at the time of writing – close to a 70% increase.

It’s a rally that has led many analysts (such as Ryan Selkis, founder of the Messari crypto-intelligence firm) to believe that the crypto bear market may well be in retreat.

Bitcoin shifts up a gear: Glassnode

Indeed, on-chain (blockchain) analytics gurus Glassnode said overnight (AEDT) that Bitcoin “appears to be shifting gears” amid the US banking turmoil. And it points to several chain signals that indicate the asset may be in the early stages of a bull market.

The firm has released its latest weekly report, showing that Bitcoin’s average monthly transaction count reached 309.5k/day over the past week – the highest level since Bitcoin hit $64,000 in April 2021.

Additionally, more than 122,000 unique new users have appeared on the chain each day – higher than nearly 90% of all other days.

“When more people interact and transact within the Bitcoin economy, it is usually associated with periods of increasing adoption, network effects and investor activity,” Glassnode wrote.

The increase in network activity is also creating some congestion and transaction fee pressure on the Bitcoin blockchain, which Glassnode notes is “a common precursor to more constructive markets”.

Top 10 overview

The overall market has cooled off a bit since yesterday, but with Bitcoin hanging on to most of the recent gains for nowthe US banking crisis looks like a giant advertisement for the OG crypto (and, of course, the traditional “safe haven asset” which is also gold).

Roman Trading, one of the Crypto Twitter analysts who appear regularly in our feed, is never behind in coming up with bearish takes. Here, however, he has a fairly positive tone for at least varying consolidation this year and a broader “macro bullish” outlook for Bitcoin.

Overdraft and downdraft: 11–100

With a market cap of around $8.6 billion to around $425 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour winners and losers at press time. (Statistics accurate at time of publication, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

PUMPS

• XDC network (XDC), (market cap: USD 546 million) +12%

• MultiverseX (EGLD), (mc: USD 1.18 billion) +6%

• Synthetix network (SNX), (mc: USD 958 million) +2%

• Solana (SOL), (mc: USD 8.6 billion) +1%

SLUMPS

• ImmutableX (IMX), (market cap: USD 1.08 billion) -16%

• Conflux (CFX), (mc: USD 865 million) -13%

• SingularityNET (AGIX), (mc: USD 557 million) -12%

• Reproduce (RNDR), (mc: 490 million USD) -10%

• Optimism (OP), (mc: USD 792 million) -9%

Around the blocks

Some relevance and randomness that stuck with us this morning is moving through the Crypto Twitterverse.