Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author｜Nan Zhi (@Assassin_Malvo)
Since the Bitcoin spot ETF was approved, the price of Bitcoin has soared, and it is only one step away from the 100,000 mark. However, in this bull market, only Bitcoin has risen so far, and the proportion of Bitcoin in the total market value of the crypto market has been rising steadily.
Will the alt season come? Or is 100,000 Bitcoin the peak of the bull market? We compared data from the past four years to answer this question.
Basic information
Data Source
The data involved in this article include ① Bitcoin price, ② Bitcoin contract rate, ③ Bitcoin contract transaction volume, ④ Bitcoin contract active purchase transaction volume, ⑤ stablecoin total market value, ⑥ crypto market total market value, ⑦ Bitcoin total market value, ⑧ Nasdaq transaction volume, etc.
The contract price in ① comes from Binance, and the spot price comes from CoinGecko; ②-④ data comes from Binance Contracts; ⑤, ⑥, ⑦ come from CoinGecko and DefiLlama; ⑧ comes from Yahoo Finance.
Key points of the chart
This article aims to "qualitatively" explore the stage of market development rather than quantitative analysis. Therefore, in order to improve the readability of the charts, the charts involved in this article are drawn using Origin, and except for the data of "stablecoin market value", all data are smoothed (the parameters are Savitzky-Golay smoothing, window size 30, 2nd order fitting, and the degree of smoothing is relatively high. Readers are advised to pay attention only to trend changes. Figures that need to be paid attention to separately will be directly pointed out in the text).
Looking back, what data indicated the arrival of the peak?
Funding Rate
Funding rate is undoubtedly one of the most well-known and intuitive data for the public. We first reviewed the first wave of bull market from January to May 2021. The relationship between Bitcoin funding rate and Bitcoin price is shown in the figure below:
A very significant rule can be obtained from this. Peak prices and extreme rates coexist, and extreme rates often appear before price peaks. The three extreme values of the rate appeared in early January, mid-to-early February, and mid-April respectively, corresponding to prices of 40,000, 45,000, and 60,000 US dollars respectively.
But at the same time, it should be noted that a high rate does not necessarily mean an absolute top. On the contrary, higher rates are more obvious in the early stages of a bull market.
The Bitcoin rate and trend from the end of 2023 to April 2024 are shown in the figure below:
It can be seen that the market around 24 years ago was obviously much calmer. Although Bitcoin hit a new record high, the fee rate did not break through the 0.1% mark again (the maximum value occurred on March 5, with a price of 66,839 USDT). But again, we see that the fee rate reached the high point before the price reached the high point.
Active buying volume
Here we selected the active buy transaction amount of Bitcoin contracts in Binance as the research object, and also selected January-May 2021 as the research object. It can also be clearly seen that this indicator is a "counter-index" or "lagging indicator".
The peak of active buying transaction volume is often later than the peak of the price. At the same time, the active buying transaction volume increases faster during the decline from the peak, indicating that users in 21 years prefer to actively buy at the bottom when the price falls.
The data from the end of 2023 to April 24 is as follows. What is more magical is that this indicator has become a "positive indicator" again. The active buying volume appears simultaneously or slightly earlier than the price peak, and the volatility is larger and more obvious. It is expected to become an effective reference indicator.
Stablecoin circulation market value
In the 21-year bull market, the Fed's unlimited QE and the influx of hot money from outside the circle led Tether to frantically issue more USDT, accelerating the progress of the bull market. We first reviewed the total market value of USDT and the total market value of cryptocurrencies from 21 to 23 years as follows:
It can be seen that stablecoins have no correlation with the trend at a small level, and it is necessary to zoom in to the annual line level to show a little correlation.
Bitcoin Price and Alt Season
The Bitcoin price, Bitcoin market value, total market value of altcoins and market value share over the past 4.5 years are shown in the following figure:
Just talking about 2020 and 2021, when the first wave of Bitcoin was launched, the market share of altcoins dropped sharply, and then quietly turned in early 21. The more Bitcoin rose, the higher the share of altcoins.
Back to the present, Bitcoin has already completed the first and second waves of launch, but the proportion of altcoins has not fallen rapidly, and there is no obvious sign of bottoming out and rebound.
It is difficult to predict the trend, but in terms of absolute value, the two key share rates of the last bull market were 30% at the bottom in early January 2021 and 40% in mid-February 2021. The current value is 46%, which is not far from the nearest starting point.
Market activity
Last week, on-chain analyst @ai_ 9684 xtpa posted on the X platform: “Since Binance launched the GOAT contract at the end of October, it is clear that Binance’s attitude towards Memecoin has begun to change. In the past 30 trading days (2024.10.07 - 11.15), Binance’s trading volume is 10% higher than Nasdaq, 2 times that of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 16 times that of Coinbase, and accounts for about 50% of the global centralized exchange trading volume.
First ask if, then ask what - has the market transaction volume reached a historical peak? After reviewing the data, we found that the Bitcoin contract transaction volume on November 12 hit the fourth highest record in 4 years (the first three occurred on March 5, 24, August 5 and February 28), and the fifth highest point was on May 19, 2021.
So does the peak in transaction volume mean the market top? The data for the past four years is shown in the following figure:
As can be seen, there were only three peaks above $30 billion, and the first two occurred near the apex.
(Note: The actual peak transaction volume is 50 billion to 60 billion US dollars. The extreme value is smoothed here.)
What stage are we in?
In summary, fees, active buying volume, and total volume are leading indicators of the market. The total volume has issued a warning, so what stage are the other two indicators at now?
The rates are shown below. It can be seen that the current rates are still at a low point, far lower than in March this year, not to mention the crazy stage in 21.
The active buying transaction volume is shown in the figure below. This indicator also hit a record high on November 21.
