Bitcoin Loses Ground, Ether Drops Even As Inflows Increase; Litecoin edges up, with halving cited
Bitcoin fell on Tuesday morning in Asia to trade below the $27,500 support line, with the drop attributed to more profit-taking after this year’s strong rally. Ether and most other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies traded lower amid a broader correction in the crypto market. XRP led the losers, while Litecoin stood out as the only gainer in the top 10. US stock futures edged lower in Asia ahead of a flurry of economic readings and first-quarter earnings reports from major US companies this week. Wall Street closed mixed on Monday.
Bitcoin fell 1.22% to US$27,461 in the 24 hours to 9:00 a.m. in Hong Kong for a loss of 6.51% for the week, according to CoinMarketCap data. The world’s largest cryptocurrency retreated to USD 27,070 at some point on Tuesday morning, its lowest price since March 28.
Ether fell 1.88% to $1,841, losing 11.25% for the week and erasing gains since April 12 from the Shanghai upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain.
XRP led the losers, falling 4.75% to $0.4596 for a seven-day loss of 10.27%.
Bitcoin’s slide over the past week has investors profiting from the token’s surge so far this year, according to a Monday blog post from investment firm CoinShares, which noted an outflow of US$30 million from digital asset investment products in the week ending April 21, interrupting a 6 weeks of driving with inflows.
However, Ether saw an inflow of $17 million in the past week, suggesting some confidence among Ether investors following the Shanghai upgrade.
Despite the widespread profit-taking, UK-based Standard Chartered Bank said on Monday that Bitcoin could reach US$100,000 by the end of 2023 amid recent failures of traditional banks, a surge in crypto-mining profits and the potential end of US monetary policy the tightening cycle, according to Reuters.
Litecoin managed to log gains despite the general downtrend, rising 0.76% to $87.99. This followed a tweet from Litecoin that took notice token’s third halving event is in 100 days, which will make the coin more scarce. Still, it has some catching up to do as it has lost 11.09% in the last seven days.
The total crypto market cap fell 1.20% in the last 24 hours to $1.16 trillion. The total trading volume in the last 24 hours rose 28.71% to 38.23 billion USD.
In the non-fungible token (NFT) market, the Forkast 500 NFT index fell 0.57% to 3,755.63 in the 24 hours to 9:00 a.m. in Hong Kong, down 7.23% for the week. The index is a proxy measure of the performance of the global NFT market and includes 500 eligible smart contracts on a given day. It is managed by CryptoSlam, a sister company of Forkast.News under the Forkast.Labs umbrella.
The underperformance of the NFT market can be attributed to an increase in gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain, following the recent rise of memecoin PEPE. However, the memecoin, which was launched on April 14, fell 18.81% to US$0.0000002626 in the 24 hours to 19:00 Monday in Hong Kong. The coin is still up over 392% on the weekly chart and has a market cap of around $116 million, according to DEXTools.
U.S. stock futures traded flat to lower at 9 a.m. in Hong Kong. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures inched 0.04% lower. The S&P 500 fell 0.10% and the Nasdaq Composite Index fell 0.09%. The three indexes closed mixed in regular Monday trading on Wall Street, with investors facing a busy week with inflation gauges and earnings from U.S. companies.
178 of the S&P 500 companies will release first-quarter results this week, including Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta.
On the inflation front, investors also face US first-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) on Thursday and personal consumption expenditures on Friday, which will provide insight into the broader US economy and the Federal Reserve’s possible next move on interest rates. Analysts forecast annual growth of 2.5% in US real GDP, down from 2.6% in the previous quarter.
US interest rates are currently between 4.75% and 5%, the highest since June 2006. Analysts at CME Group now see a 16% chance the Fed will leave rates unchanged at its next meeting on May 3, while 84% predict 25 basis point increase, down from 89.1% on Monday.
