The most anticipated event for the crypto industry in April 2024 will be the halving of Bitcoin. So far, the procedure for reducing the reward to miners has undergone a hard fork - Bitcoin Cash. How did it affect the market and prices?
Bitcoin
Bitcoin decreased in price by 2.74% from March 29 to April 5, 2024. If at the beginning of Sunday the first cryptocurrency still tried to stay above $71,500, then in the second half BTC rose to $64,500, which became the minimum for the last ten days.
The situation was marked by the minimum supply of the largest cryptocurrency on exchanges in three years. Analytics platform CryptoQuant has recorded an outflow of 90,700 BTC in the past month.
Banks began to directly contact Bitcoin miners. According to Asher Genoot, CEO of HUT 8 mining company, this practice will become commonplace in the near future.
Another analytical platform Glassnode presented a Sunday report, according to which an interesting trend was noted: the calculation between the offers of long-term and short-term investors is decreasing. This explains the rise in the price of BTC in mid-March to the end of April, which pushed the big players to partially lock in their profits.
From a technical analysis perspective, Bitcoin is in a wide range between the resistance levels of $73,794 and the support levels of $60,760. The overall trend remains as the price is above the 50-day moving average (marked in blue) and the RSI indicator is above 50.
The fear and greed index was unchanged from last week. Its value is 79. This continues to speak of extreme thirst among Bitcoin investors.
Ethereum
Ether has decreased by 7.5% over the past week. The biggest drop occurred in one trading session, on Tuesday, when ETH collapsed immediately by 6.46%. The second largest cryptocurrency failed to stay above $3,600. ETH is currently trading at $3,250.
Despite the decline in the value of the coin, things are going quite badly in Ethereum. Last Sunday, a report from analyst firm Coin98 was published, according to which a number of ETH indicators rose significantly in the first quarter of 2024. For example, commission income alone increased to $1.17 billion. This is 155% higher than in 2023 for the entire period. The number of daily active users on the network increased to 404,000, as well as the number of transactions per day to 1.18 million.
Some movement has finally begun for spot Ether ETFs. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has announced a three-week deadline during which it will respond to the applications of Fidelity, Bitwise and Grayscale IInvestments.
From a technical analysis point of view, the ether continues to correct. For the second, it will be important to stay above the support level of $3059 during the capitalization of the cryptocurrency. The fact that the price has fallen below the 50-day moving average (shown in blue) indicates the dominance of the bears. In addition, the RSI indicator is decreasing: it is already below the 50 mark. A changing trend can be expected after overcoming the resistance level - $3,679.
