One battle after another

As analysts question whether Bitcoin bulls possess the wherewithal to push the largest crypto back above $69,000, the U.S. spot BTC ETF market has shown surprising resiliency. The sector’s inflow streak has reached three days. These ETFs have in the past two days amassed $312 million worth of new assets, almost offsetting last week’s outflows, which totaled $318 million. Just on Tuesday, spot BTC ETFs netted $166.6M, even as the crypto world continued to wobble.

Institutional dip buying? Some analysts believe that the pickup in ETF inflows shows how some investors may be starting to rebuild exposure at lower levels, according to Trading View.

Meanwhile, in the realm of real world assets (RWAs), the tokenized commodity market is turning heads. As of January 1, tokenized commodities as a category totaled $4B. It’s now $6B. The YTD spike in gold has spurred more precious metal investments to arrive on-chain. Tether Gold has been the biggest beneficiary of the trend; its market cap increased 52% in the past month to reach $3.6B (Cointelegraph).

Crypto isn’t getting flambéed like it did last week but a funk has set in.

The total market declined 2.7% in the past 24 hours to reach $2.36 trillion, according to CoinGecko. The record high for total market value was $4.35 trillion, a milestone hit this past October with Bitcoin reaching its zenith of $126,080 on Oct. 6.

BTC has plunged 47% since then. It fell another 2.6% in the past day, falling below $67,000. Within the past 24 hours, BTC sank to as low as $66,459.67, according to CoinGecko. 

Ethereum, meanwhile, remains below $2,000. ETH’s ATH of $4,946.05 came back in August, per CoinGecko. Big Ten coins are down and down (and down some more) with BNB (-5.4%) enduring the brunt of the broadly based bruising.

Checking CoinGecko’s top categories, Proof-of-Stake (PoS) assets as a group tumbled most significantly, losing about 7% since this time yesterday. ETH and BNB are the two biggest tokens in the PoS bucket. Also in there, and in the red, are SOL and ADA. Among the Top 20 categories, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) leads all laggards across seven days. The DeFi cohort collectively shed 49% in that span. A digital derivatives DEX, MYX Finance, is getting particularly pummeled as of today. The platform’s native MYX plunged 19% in the past 24 hours. With a market value of approximately $900M, MYX still remains among the top 20 DeFi coins, per CoinGecko. 

One DeFi flyer, Hyperliquid (HYPE), has come in for a landing. HYPE remains up 22% over the past month. But it has shed 12% since last week at this time. HYPE’s market cap is now roughly $6.9B, making it the third-largest DeFi coin.

Macro headwinds are howling. Crypto confronts a cold spell marked by low liquidity, exacerbated by hawkish monetary policy signals. But not every pundit is striking such a sour note. Bernstein analysts have described current digital market jitters as merely “temporary.”

Keith Alan, who is the co-founder of trading resource provider Material Indicators, explained that BTC is trading in a pivotal, well-traversed historical zone — indeed, as some may recall, the $60K-$69K price range held sway for a good chunk of 2024 — and buy pressure is just too puny to break resistance. It’s an unfairly tilted tug-of-war, potentially resulting in a lethargy lasting for months. “That doesn’t mean it will be impenetrable,” said Material Indicators’ Alan. “It just means that it's going to take a lot of momentum to break it.”