A Bitcoin Rally Past $28.5K
DOGE was down and so were jobs. But bitcoin wasn’t.
The largest cryptocurrency by market value was recently trading at $28,622, up 2.6% as investors contemplated a welcome dip in the heated job market but also remained cautious about the future after weeks of banking uncertainty.
Trading and volatility were light. On Monday, BTC had tumbled below the $28,000 threshold it has largely surpassed over the past two weeks after a rumor spread that Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao faced an international law enforcement request to detain him. (Binance denied the rumor in an email to The Block.)
“Bitcoin is hovering around the high end of its recent range as crypto traders await to see how it will benefit from the current banking crisis,” said Edward Moya, although he also noted that “the Bitcoin bear case” was growing.
Ether spent the day outperforming BTC and was changing hands above $1,900 for the first time since last August. The second largest crypto by market value was up 5.5% from Monday, at the same time.
Other major cryptos were largely in the green, albeit lighter shades. MATIC, the token of layer 2 platform Polygon, and SOL, the token of the Solana blockchain, recently jumped 5.2% and 3.8%, respectively. Popular meme coin DOGE dropped 0.7%. The decline came a day after it climbed dramatically as Elon Musk’s Twitter replaced the social-media platform’s familiar blue bird logo atop its homepage with the cryptocurrency’s iconic Shiba Inu dog. DOGE is up 21% from the start of the week.
The CoinDesk Market Index, a measure of crypto markets’ overall performance, was recently up more than 3%.
U.S. equity markets fell slightly with the tech-focused Nasdaq and S&P 500 both closing down about a half-percentage point. But gold – the traditional, safe-haven asset – soared above $2,000, reaching its highest level since last March after a U.S. Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report showed job vacancies falling below 10 million for the first time in almost two years, and a day after another report showed durable goods orders waning. The signs of economic decline coupled with ongoing inflation concerns have created a favorable backdrop for more conservative assets that historically hold their value through good times and bad.
“A weakening economy continues to drive safe-haven flows towards gold,” Oanda’s Moya wrote. “The JOLTS report supported the view that the economy is steadily weakening its way towards a recession.”
He added that investors should monitor bitcoin’s price near the end of a Good Friday-shortened working week, and the Labor Department releases nonfarm payroll figures. “Bitcoin has had a key price barrier at the $30,000 level and if Friday’s NFP report shocks to the downside, we could see high-frequency trading systems and algos try to take advantage of any momentum opportunities,” Moya wrote.
