Bitcoin gets smacked

Theta (THETA) continues to pour it on, cresting up the crypto ranks with a 70% gain over the past week.

Per CoinGecko, as of Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. (EST), THETA, the crypto connected with the network known for decentralized video streaming, had $11.8 billion worth of market capitalization, making it the No. 10 largest digital asset ranked by cap, knocking out Chainlink (LINK) with its $11.3 billion.

In the past 24 hours, THETA surged 17% to $11.80. It is up 500% in the past three months.

A new version of Theta will be launched to keep up with the NFT boom, said Finance Magnates' Bilal Jafar, noting how "irrationally” THETA is sought in South Korea.

Meanwhile, XRP, the token closely associated with Ripple, popped by as much as 10% yesterday as some reports now suggest there is a viable path for XRP to be re-listed on U.S. exchanges.

XRP has jumped above $0.57, but turned flat in the past few hours. Over the past week, it's up 31%.

With bulls unable to firmly take hold of Bitcoin's steering wheel, that task fell to bears. And early Tuesday morning, the situation looked grisly. The darkest period was indeed just before dawn. At one point, BTC got mauled to the tune of having $5,500 worth of its flesh torn away, as it dropped below $53,000. Looking at the 24-hour period that concluded at 9 a.m. (EST), BTC appeared to be in some pain, although on the mend. All told, it fell 4% in that time, resting at about $55,000.

What seems like an agonizing morning for Bitcoin becomes a lakeside stroll when considered alongside March 23, 2020. The pandemic had just got real. Crypto and stock markets sold off. BTC was in proximity of $6K per coin, or about the amount shaved off its price at one juncture overnight.

For more perspective, there are on-chain analysts, such as Ki-Young Ju who looks at BTC's Fund Flow Ratio (FFR) across all of the exchanges (relative to the flows not on exchanges).

One day before the great BTC sell-off of March 12, the FFR shot above 16%. BTC fell 50%. Currently, the FFR is 7%, a considerably low number.

To give this metric some more perspective: the FFR measures network transaction volume of exchanges like Coinbase, relative to all of the BTC transferred on the Bitcoin network; the lower the FFR figure, the fewer the transactions on exchanges. And so if the BTC transaction volume is not happening on exchanges, then where is it happening?

Outside the exchanges, at venues such as over-the-counter (OTC) trading desks. This type of activity is construed as retail movement, deemed not as long-lasting/impactful as the moves made by the largest BTC holders who transact on exchanges.

Another piece of on-chain analysis showed that while the smaller tier of the largest holders have taken profits, the larger "whales" are still accumulating (CoinGape).

The incredible BTC gains of the past 12 months remain bound by the propensity of market dynamics to play out as they tend to do, producing, from time to time, as Cointelegraph notes, relatively calm, consolidative periods.

A time for the BTC market to find a new floor. Only then can a fresh start occur. In a bull market, such a moment conceivably could be taken as a signal of yet another leg up still to come – not a reason to be afraid.