Some smaller altcoins rally

Save for a select trio of coins (Filecoin, Toncoin, Litecoin), the Top 30 bracket of digital assets remain red-soaked as of early Wednesday. Still, a handful of small-cap altcoins are making headlines and moving higher over 24 hours.

Go ahead and Google Tezos, the 49th-largest crypto, per CoinGecko. Tezos gained 5% since this time yesterday amidst the breaking news that Google Cloud is about to become a validator on the Tezos network. It appears to be a bid to jumpstart Web3 development among Google's corporate clients who will be able to tap into the Tezos network and deploy its blockchain-software-abetting nodes.

"Such integrations demonstrate the interest that tech giants are taking in blockchain and Web3 projects," CoinDesk said.

Meanwhile, at the rearmost section of the Top 100 gallery, we see a green day dawning for No. 84 Zilliqa, a blockchain project in the midst of a strong push into Web3 gaming; ZIL was making a run at 4 cents following a gain of nearly 9% in the past 24 hours as of 7:52 a.m. (EST). ZIL has not been $0.04 since the late summer.

And don't dismiss Basic Attention Token, a blockchain-based digital advertising disruptor. BAT, 99th coin on the wall, notched a 5.6% gain in 24 hours, although it's not quite clear what may have helped give it a lift.

Singularly most-scorching among the Top 100 – that would be Stacks, up 14% in 24 hours. Stacks is a layer-2 blockchain that leverages the security of the Bitcoin blockchain to settle transactions, opening the door to making Bitcoin more resemble Ethereum in terms of being able to run smart contracts, which opens the doors to decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The rise in Ordinals' NFTs has triggered a huge rally in STX. The token has gained 138% in the past week.

STX now has a market capitalization in the neighborhood of $990 million. Owing to Ordinals, STX still has room to go higher, above $1 billion, Matrixport said.

U.S. stocks got slammed on Tuesday, but Bitcoin continued to demonstrate its lesser-correlating ways, holding on to the $24K mark while only getting relatively slightly dinged. BTC is down 1.7% over 24 hours.

The correlation between BTC and the S&P 500 is nearing its lowest point in more than a year, but still registering as a slightly positive correlation, and even a whiff of causality could dampen crypto in a wider securities market setting that all of a sudden is decidedly risk-off.

We watch the majors closely and sometimes notice a correlation between BTC and the second-largest crypto, Ethereum, which today is holding on to a $1,600 handle. ETH is down 1.6% over 24 hours.

Well, would you look at that ... they crossed! Bitcoin's 50-day and 200-day exponential moving averages, they actually crossed.

Indeed, on the technical charts, this past weekend, there they were: BTC crosses of gold. Usually bullish signals, golden crosses for the largest digital asset have only been wittnessed six times in history.

So now we wait. In recent trading days, as CoinDesk noted, BTC has "alternated between positive and negative gains on average volume, providing little clear direction for sentiment."

BTC merely even flirting with $25,000 of late is psychologically vital but a stair step taped-off as too slippery.

Popular analyst Michael van de Poppe believes that BTC could go to a high of $40,000, but then correct.

Glassnode data would seem to suggest an impending jamboree of stud bulls.

BTC miners and short-term holders are selling, the data shows; at the same time, long-term holders and large holders, known as whales, appear to be accumulating (CryptoNews).

Extrapolating from past post-golden-cross-pops, BTC could potentially breach $26,500 at some point in the short-term.