Bitcoin price stagnates as lacklustre market action dominates the holiday weekend
Despite the Easter weekend, Bitcoin has failed to gain any sort of positive financial momentum.
- BTC's 12-month profit/loss ratio currently stands at -33%.
- Institutional BTC acquisitions have been gaining a lot of momentum, with the Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) recently adding another 2,633 BTC to its coffers.
- Poor liquidity is causing the cryptocurrency market to stagnate, as per experts.
Bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency by total market capitalisation, continues to struggle financially. The flagship digital asset has failed to maintain support above the all-important AUD$54k price range since 12 April. As a result, BTC's weekly losses now stand at -6% while trading at AUD$54,065.
Despite the holiday season being in play, the crypto market has registered little to no positive price action, a trend that the equities sector also reflected. With Monday 18 April all set as a non-trading day, it appears that further price stagnation is on the cards.
On a technical note, liquidity has also stayed quite low over the past weekend, with analysts suggesting that any "sudden moves" in the near term could thin out order books even further — potentially causing a marketwide meltdown.
Analysts working for Deribit, one of the world's leading crypto trading platforms, noted that low liquidity volumes were having an active effect on the decision of investors to not put in more money into the market (at least over the last 72 hours). The trend is likely to persist over the coming week.
Lastly, on where the market is headed, pundits believe that for BTC to reclaim its former bullish momentum, it needs to cleanly break past the US$44.5k mark or at least hold support around US$42k for a few days running.
Sluggishness to continue?
In terms of where the market is headed in the midterm, independent analyst Kevin Svenson noted that Bitcoin's ongoing price movements were currently mimicking those observed back in Q4 2018 when the currency crashed after having scaled up to relative highs. He added that if we witness a repeat of the trend, then BTC might face numerous dips over the course of 2022, adding:
"The difference between those higher lows and a breakdown is significant right now, so just being blindly on one side and not considering anything else is a little bit foolish in my opinion."
At press time, the total market capitalisation of the digital asset sector stands at AUD$2.65 trillion. Bitcoin's market dominance ratio stands at just under 40%.
Institutional buying continues
Data from blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant shows that institutional Bitcoin buying has been increasing quite rapidly in recent weeks, More than 30,000 BTC have moved from Coinbase Pro — Coinbase's professional trading wing — over the last 48 hours.
However, what's even more surprising is that this event has not been an anomaly. CryptoQant researchers noted that a growing amount of BTC has been moving from centralised finance (CeFi) trading platforms to various private wallet addresses since the beginning of March, something that suggests rising institutional interest.
To this point, blockchain protocol Terra recently added 2,633 BTC (US$105.3 million) to its crypto coffers recently, making the project the 18th largest Bitcoin wallet holder in the world. The company now owns even more BTC than Tesla.
Interested in cryptocurrency? Learn more about the basics with our beginner's guide to Bitcoin, dive deeper by learning about Ethereum and see what blockchain can do with our simple guide to DeFi.
Disclosure: The author owns a range of cryptocurrencies at the time of writing.
