BTC keeps climbing
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 28th February 2024.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
Don’t invest in crypto unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong.
What’s up
Suddenly, Scarily, Bitcoin Rockets Past $60K
Early today, Bitcoin hit $59,000. It was only Monday morning that BTC was $51,000.
Okay, the $60K mark just fell as we were signing off on today's newsletter. Bullish attitudes are holding sway. Tailwinds rip. You've got a heady stew of ETF inflows, the miner rewards halving, mathematically shrinking supply, and now a growing demand for coins, and also an overall consensus-bred sense of inevitability/invincibility.
All of these (mostly positive) dynamics have been converging this week. BTC has gained 18% since last week at this time.
It’s not just the largest crypto rallying, though. No. 2 Ethereum has gained 15% over the past seven days, reaching $3,350.
Among the Big Ten, BTC, the biggest coin, enjoyed the largest gain of the past day, rising 6.3% in the 24 hours concluding at 7:22 a.m. (EST), per CoinGecko.
XRP, seventh-biggest digital asset as measured by market capitalization, gained 4.8% since yesterday. It's $0.587. XRP hasn't been above $0.60 since early January. Fading from memory is the mid-July of ‘23 spike above $0.80 for the token associated with Ripple. That jump occurred after a court said Ripple had not necessarily run afoul of regulatory rules when it sold XRP via secondary market transactions back in 2013. The SEC sued Ripple over that offering. The suit was filed in late 2020. The favorable ruling this past July was part of a summary judgment, a confounding one at that, as it simultaneously found that the XRP sold directly to institutional investors represented a rules violation, giving the SEC a partial win.
The convoluted case is still dragging on. Some experts do expect Ripple to settle. However, the impaneling of a jury to decide remediation isn't off the table.
Some months ago, the SEC waved the white flag in its legal battle with Grayscale which had sued the agency in a bid to convert its GBTC trust fund vehicle into a full-fledged ETF. The asset manager's wish ultimately was granted, resulting in the door opening for a slew of new spot BTC ETF products which are now eating Grayscale's lunch.
Yesterday, BlackRock’s IBIT recorded more than $1.3 billion in daily trading volume for the second consecutive day.
What's down
BTC Remains Off All-Time High But Not By Much
As of Wednesday, at 9:35 a.m. (EST), BTC was roughly $60,200. The largest crypto has rallied 40% since the start of the year.
BTC hasn't been $60K since its pinnacle month – November of 2021. Remember then?
It was an uneasy but hopeful time of light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, with international flights filled with vaccinated passengers finally landing in the U.S. again, while on the ground masks were coming off, although the new Omicron variant had just then surfaced, raising new concerns about a renewed surge in Covid cases.
Meanwhile, U.S. inflation had notched a 30-year-high. Interest rates were 0.25% and most economists were bracing for hikes.
The rate hikes would come. And the light at the end of the tunnel, at least for crypto, would turn out to have emanated from the lead engine of an oncoming freight train of interconnected calamities reaching a crescendo with the collapse of FTX.
One year after hitting its heralded ATH, Bitcoin in November of 2022 would fall to below $17,000.
Bitcoin is now only 12% off that record high of $69,044.77 reached Nov. 10, 2021, per CoinGecko.
What's next
Primo Ethereum Rally Signal Starts Flashing
The other big-time bullish story this week, apart from Bitcoin’s remarkable run, is Ethereum's wicked surge amidst a wave of growing excitement surrounding its Dencun upgrade.
Yesterday, developers announced that the change, ushering in the era of proto-danksharding, touted as a scaling solution, will hit the Ethereum mainnet on March 13.
"The upgrade will make transactions on the network much faster and more affordable," Decrypt said.
According to a new report from ByBit, institutional portfolios appear to be giving ETH more weighting ahead of potential spot ETFs.
CryptoQuant attributes ETH's recent rally (+48% in 30 days) to stepped-up buying in the U.S., particularly on Coinbase, creating a "Coinbase premium" versus ETH purchased via Binance.
This premium metric is now rising again, CoinDesk said, hinting at the potential for more ETH gains in the weeks ahead.
