Proactive Investors - Bitcoin volumes surged to a five-week high in the past 24 hours, supporting a strong Thursday trading session that saw the BTC/USDT pair close 3.7% higher at US$29,470.
Friday morning’s Asia trading session has been fairly choppy, but has so far managed to sustain the US$29,400 mark, sparking hopes of a break above the critical 30k resistance point, where profit takers have positioned large quantities of sell orders.
An even spread of long and short liquidations on the futures market suggests that sentiment is squarely balanced between the bears and the bulls as the week comes to a close.
Looking back on the seven-day period, Bitcoin has managed to add close to 5%, with a few catalysts including renewed fears in the traditional finance sector following First Republic North’s dire circumstances, and a handful of positive Big Tech earnings and share price movements from the likes of Meta (NASDAQ:META) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).
Bitcoin (BTC) goes higher – Source: currency.com
Ethereum added around 2.3% yesterday and another 0.3% this morning, bringing the ETH/USDT pair comfortably above US$1,910.
Even if ether manages to see further upside throughout the day, a move above US$1,950 could be a hard task given the substantial amount of selling pressure on the Binance order book.
ETH underperformed against Bitcoin on a week-on-week basis, dipping 0.5% across the period, suggesting the significant upside enjoyed post-Shanghai upgrade has run its course.
ETH’s underperformance filtered through to popular Ethereum Layer-2 protocol Optimism (OP), which ended the week over 10% lower with a market capitalisation below US$685mln.
Blue-chip altcoins had a pretty flat week, with Polkadot, BNB, {{1158819|Dogecoin}, Polygon and Shiba Inu all closing a few percentage points lower.
Solana, Cardano and Ripple fared slightly better, adding between 0.5% and 1.5% apiece.
In the decentralised finance (DeFi) space, PancakeSwap plummeted over 23% due to a massive spike in token inflation, dragging the decentralised exchange’s market cap below US$516mln.
Derivatives exchange Synthetix also had a lousy week, dropping close to 10% in value.
It was a net positive week for the crypto markets as a whole, with global market cap adding 1.8% to US$1.21tn.
Read more on Proactive Investors UK
