Crypto powers back

A round of favorable macro news and some retail buying propelled Bitcoin back toward $64,000 this past weekend, partly erasing anxious feelings about a recent test of two-month lows below $57K.

Now prepare for an unhurried slog to slightly elevated terrain this summer, some crypto watchers insist.

BTC's certainly plodding along to start the week, turning in a 0.3% gain in 24 hours to hit $64,100 as of Monday at 7:50 a.m. (EST).

On Friday, inflation concerns eased on soft job report figures and the dollar surrendered some of its dominant sway. Meanwhile, the phrase "positive net inflows" regained relevancy in the BTC ETF marketplace. And so BTC spiked through Saturday. A bunch of altcoins followed the leader.

Hedera, for example, shot from 10 cents to 12 cents in the past day. HBAR is up nearly 15% since last Monday. Dogecoin and Toncoin also each rose 15% in that same span. Avalanche's AVAX has gained 16%. A bevy of bouncing cryptos buoyed hopes that the worst of this corrective event has been relegated to the rear-view mirror.

For its part, BTC has added $8,000 to its spot price versus the lowest point of last week’s downturn.

Former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes said the next few months will likely see BTC trade in a range between $60K and $70K (CoinDesk).

"I expect prices to bottom, chop and begin a slow grind higher," Hayes said.

Levered-up participants in the perpetual futures markets are still nursing sore backsides from last week’s slide to as low as $56.5K.

Funding rates have shifted neutral, per a social media post from Decentrader.

These rates can reflect sentiment. A high positive rate is seen as bullish, with traders willing to pay more to maintain long positions; a high negative rate, conversely, indicates a preference for short selling, or bearish sentiment.

As of the end of last week, funding rates were negative.

The current snapshot of neutrality among leveraged traders would suggest BTC's weekend bounce isn't seen as all that convincing (Cointelegraph).

Seeking to quantify how crypto wealth impacts the U.S. economy, a team of academics appear to have found a surprising counter-narrative to the notion that digital windfalls end up frittered away on sports cars and bling.

Long-term holders may sometimes feel like they've hit the jackpot but spending habits do not reflect lottery-windfall-type frivolity, according to a paper co-authored by researchers from Brigham Young University, Northwestern University, Emory University and Imperial College London.

Some of the household profits reaped over roughly the past decade – a period in which Bitcoin produced a 17,000% cumulative return – went toward buying houses.

"Spending out of crypto gains is more like the patterns we see from traditional equity investments,” said Darren Aiello, a finance professor at BYU and one of the paper's co-authors.

The researchers crunched expenditure data connected with 60 million people to analyze how crypto wealth spills over into the "real" American economy.

Interestingly, the study found that 16% of the households made deposits to crypto exchanges at some point in the ten-year period through the end of 2023.

A "significant portion" of crypto windfalls spilled into local housing markets, the researchers found.

This was especially true in the states where crypto is most popular, including Utah, Nevada and California.