Bitcoin (BTC) has rallied after a news-driven dip on February 13. BTC now has regained a market capitalization of over $1 trillion.
The cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) has broken the $52,000 mark just days after rising above $51,000, as bears and bulls fight to determine the extent of this current run. The uncertain nature of the market can be shown in articles pointing to a ’brick wall’ of resistance, while bitcoin bulls consider $69,000 as the next major milestone for the digital currency.
Let’s see where the arguments stand.
’Brick wall’ resistance
Analyst Cole Garner noted on X that the Bitfinex trading platform essentially set a cap at $52,000 - $52,300 with asks dominating in that range. Furthermore, replenishment with new asks comes in almost in real time.
The culprit, according to Garner, are U.S. Bitcoin exchange traded funds (ETFs) with excess liquidity for BTC purchases in the $50,000 range. Another ETF could possibly wipe up the demand, he wrote.
One indicator of the state of the market shows that the brick wall idea might have some friends comes from the alternative.me Fear and Greed Index. The index takes in several factors to catch this aspect of market sentiment. Since the February 13 run started, the index has been in the Greed and Extreme Greed levels. The index high on the 13th, at 79, equals that seen in November 2021, when Bitcoin hit its all time high of approximately $69,000. However, the index has been above 70 often beginning in Q4 2023. When the index is in the mid-70s, as it is at the time this article was written, a correction is often coming in the near term.
Record ETF inflows
Cryptocurrency analyst WhalePanda posted on X on February 14 that ETFs are now throwing record amounts of money into the cryptocurrency market. Blackrock alone moved almost a half-billion dollars into the market. At the same time, $GBTC outflows had slowed to $73 milion. As WhalePanda put it:
“Moral of the story: people tried to dump $BTC cuz it was a "risk off" day but just ended up selling all their coins to Blackrock. They’ll just have to buy back higher once again.”
Market capitalization
The record inflow has brought Bitcoin’s market capitalization to over $1 trillion on February 14. The all-time high for the cryptocurrency’s market cap is $1.28 trillion in November 2021. With BTC having an overall cryptocurrency market dominance of approximately 54 percent at the time of writing, the whole crypto market can be seen as having a capitalization of just around $2 trillion.
