Proactive Investors - Bitcoin managed to break its five-day losing streak with a green candlestick to round off the weekend.
BTC/USDT added 1.7% on Sunday, bringing the pair to US$23,550, though a retraction below US$23,400 has been observed this morning.
Week on week, the benchmark crypto asset is around 4.5% down, though that’s pretty much in line with the wider risk asset class given the doggedly determined US dollar and concerns over a renewed push from the Federal Reserve hawks.
25k remains out of reach for Bitcoin (BTC) – Source: currency.com
Barring a major catalyst, BTC/USDT appears strongly supported at the US$23,340 price point, per the Binance order book, and buyers appear in the driver’s seat.
But 25k remains the elusive target for the bulls. Despite the occasional break above, bitcoin has been unable to maintain a foothold at the price point and will continue to be the primary goal for a while to come.
It may be tough, at least in the short term - with sticky US inflation and the potential for up to three more Fed rate hikes in the months to come, it’s “hard to argue with dollar strength in the near term”, said analysts at ING.
Ethereum outperformed bitcoin yesterday, adding 3% to US$1,640 on the ETH/USDT pair before heading slightly lower this morning.
ETH has been constantly rejected between its own elusive target range of US$1,650 and US$1,700.
It may not be the most volatile of weeks for both headline cryptoassets, given the fairly quiet economic calendar and bitcoin’s apparent resilience against persistent regulatory pressures.
A likely scenario would be bitcoin range trading between 23k and 24k, as we saw earlier this year.
In the altcoin space
Solana (SOL) was back at it again with a prolonged outage over the weekend, the root cause of which remains unknown.
Solana, which is a blockchain competitor to Ethereum, had an infamously terrible 2022 full of network outages and hacks which diminished the platform’s reputation somewhat.
This latest outage sent native SOL coin 8.3% lower on Saturday though it did manage to recapture these losses on the Sunday crypto bull session.
All in all, annoying for users, not a disaster for bag holders; SOL remains 127% higher year to date.
The root cause of the 2-25-23 outage is still unknown and under active investigation. The following document will be updated as new information becomes available https://t.co/kKYaTuizu0— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) February 27, 2023
Most other large-cap altcoins, including Ripple (DRP), Dogecoin (DOGE), Polkadot (DOT) and Cardano (ADA) didn’t veer from the benchmark price movements over the weekend.
Top daily risers in the top-100 set include Stacks (STX), Neo (NEO), and decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols Synthetix (SNX) and Marer (MKR).
Global cryptocurrency market capitalisation currently stands at US$1.07tn, while total value locked in the DeFi space is US$49.3bn, having added 1.9% overnight.
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