Resilient Bitcoin bounces back above $24,000 despite investors’ inflation, labor market worries
Bitcoin shows its ability to bounce back above $24K
Bitcoin spent Thursday in a jittery, uncertain mood, teetering below and above $24,000 as investors continued to evaluate the U.S. Federal Reserve’s ongoing dialogue on monetary policy and jobs that suggest inflation will remain problematic.
The largest cryptocurrency recently traded at $24,052, down 0.4% over the past 24 hours, but well off the previous week’s high above $25,000. Still, analysts remain cautiously optimistic about BTC’s outlook after seeing it rise around 40 % since the start of the year, amid an improved overall economic backdrop.
“People feel that the worst may be over in terms of bad news like we had in the crypto sector last year, and that’s why it’s [bitcoin] more resilient,” Bradley Duke, co-CEO of institutional-grade digital asset-back securities provider ETC Group, told CoinDesk’s “First Mover” program.
In a separate CoinDesk TV interview, Julius de Kempenaer, senior technical analyst at research platform Stockcharts.com, said he was encouraged by bitcoin’s ability to hold support first at $18,000 and than at higher levels in recent months, including the recent perch around $24,000. “As long as we stay around that level, where we are now — we can enter a low here and break through 25k — that’s a signal to go up to that 30k area,” de Kempenaer said.
Ether recently changed hands at $1,659, up approx. 1.1%. Other major cryptos were flat, albeit slightly tinged red with AVAX, the token of base-layer network Avalanche Network, and MATIC, the token of layer 2 platform Polygon, falling around 3% and 2.5% respectively. OPT, the parent crypto of layer 2 scaling tool Optimism, surged more than 6% hours after crypto exchange Coinbase said it is building its layer 2 blockchain using the OP stack in partnership with the protocol.
Stocks rose with the tech-heavy S&P 500 rising 0.5% to snap a four-day losing streak and the tech-focused Nasdaq and Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) rising fractions of a percentage point. Nasdaq took heart from semiconductor maker Nvidia, which on Wednesday said it expects business to improve amid euphoria about chat tool ChatGPT artificial intelligence. AI tokens have surged since the public unveiling of chatbot ChatGPT and image generation software Dall-E in mid-2022.
Meanwhile, the US Labor Department reported that initial jobless claims for the week ended February 18 fell by 3,000 to 192,000, but were below the consensus estimate of 200,000. Strong jobs data has been difficult for the US Federal Reserve as it tries to reduce inflation from 6.4% to a target rate of 2%. The ongoing fear of high prices has made venture capitalists hesitant.
On an eventful day, crypto news was mixed. As CoinDesk reported, venture capital powerhouses a16z led a $25 million Series A investment in Here Not There to build out Towns, a Web3 group chat protocol and app that allows online communities to build blockchain-based collections in a fully decentralized manner, and Pantera invested $10 million in Worldwide Webb , the creator of a pixel art based metaverse game. But federal law enforcement officials added charges against Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former CEO of crypto exchange FTX, and NFT platform Dapper Labs said it laid off 20% of its employees less than four months after a 22% workforce cut. .
Stockcharts.com’s De Kempenaer noted that “investor risk appetite is increasing again.”
“Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general could benefit from that,” he said. “And if you just look at what’s happening in the Crypto market, you see buyers coming in. They’re willing to pay higher prices, sellers are holding on longer – they just want to sell at higher prices.”
Bitcoin funding rates 10-day streak reflects investor bullishness
Bitcoin funding rates were positive for the 10th day in a row.
Financing interest represents payments between holders of perpetual futures contracts. When the price is positive, holders of long positions pay holders of short positions to remain on that side of the trade.
When funding rates are negative, the opposite is true, where shorts pay longs. In bitcoin’s case, funding rates have been positive every day since January 14th, with the exception of a neutral reading on February 12th. Investors who have long positions expect an asset’s value to increase, while those who are short an asset expect its value to decrease.
Sustained positive funding rates indicate that BTC traders currently view the asset favorably, and are willing to pay a fee to express their bullishness.
Kraken Head of OTC Options Trading Juthica Chou discussed the settlement with the US Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). ETC Group Co-CEO Bradley Duke broke down the markets. Additionally, Bitfinex Securities Operations Head of Operations Jesse Knutson discussed the future of tokenized securities. Additionally, CoinDesk’s Nik De broke down the latest details from the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit against crypto exchange CoinEx.
