Surprises at the opening of the US market combined with a weakening dollar produce confusing conditions for holders.
Bitcoin (BTC) fell at the open on Wall Street on April 29 as US markets opened to volatility, including an 11% drop in Amazon shares.
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView confirmed that the BTC/USD pair dipped to $38,622 on Friday from Bitstamp.
Despite a decline in the relentless US dollar bull run, Bitcoin showed few signs of strength as it held firmly below $40,000.
Everything Changes at the Fed
Macro factors held up against the largest cryptocurrency along with risk assets in general, commentators noted, as the Federal Reserve reduced its balance sheet.
On Twitter, Holger Zschaepitz, market maniac and author of ‘Schulden ohne Sühne?’ a book on states’ addictiveness to debt, posted that, “the start of #Fed deleveraging? Fed balance sheet has shrunk for the 2nd consecutive week. Total assets now at $8,939bn, equal to 36.6% of US’ GDP vs ECB’s 82% or BoJ’s 137%”.
For Amazon, meanwhile, the pain was immediately apparent, as missing earnings targets resulted in AMZN’s biggest intraday loss in eight years.
The S&P 500 was down 1% at the time of writing, while the Nasdaq 100 was down 0.9%.
Focusing on Bitcoin, popular trader and analyst Rekt Capital argued that the RSI might need to form a higher low and bounce to provide the market with the momentum for a short-term breakout. On Twitter, he posted that, “BTC ultimately rejects at this resistance. Now pulling back. Could BTC find a base and then rebound once the RSI Higher Low has been revisited?”
Whales Buy Again at the Bear Market Floor
Meanwhile, in its latest chart update on whale behavior, data from on-chain analytics platform Whalemap showed that buying behavior echoes the bottom of the late-2018 bear market.
According to their data, whales with balances between 1,000 and 10,000 BTC are busy accumulating BTC to the extent that they were when the BTC/USD pair hit $3,100 in December of that year. The volumes even exceed those of the $3,600 crash in March 2020.
“Whales are hoarding as much Bitcoin today as they were at the $3,000 lows,” commented analyst and indicator creator Charles Edwards.
“These are supports with approx. $40M – $400M in your wallets today. In 2018, that was $4 million – $40 million (but there were no ‘institutions’ at the time, either).”
This week, Whalemap published a map of Bitcoin’s realized price ordered by wallet size as a basis for its potential price target. The realized price shows what price each Bitcoin last moved at, making $25,000 to $27,000 a key trading point for buyers and sellers.
Data from on-chain analytics firms Glassnode and CryptoQuant show that not only has the trend of leaving BTC exchanges accelerated but also has reached levels rarely seen.
“The 30-day change in the Bitcoin Balance on Exchanges is reaching negative levels that we have only seen a handful of times in the last two years,” the On-Chain College Twitter account wrote alongside an annotated chart of the figures of Glassnode from the switch of the net position so that the coins change hands.
By Audy Castaneda
