Mooner and Shakers: Bitcoin surges past $24k as crypto market surprises, rising in tandem with US dollar

Coinhead Rob Badman
Bitcoin 24k usd

Let's hope current crypto bulls don't turn out to be bear-market clowns. (Getty Images)

Wait, what’s happened to the inverse correlation with the US dollar? Shouldn’t Bitcoin and the crypto market be plummeting right about now?

As the US Dollar Index (DXY) has something of a pump (well, it’s up 0.58%), the crypto market is surprising many as it takes the ball and bursts hard up the sideline.

https://twitter.com/SerLondonCrypto/status/1625956807825932289

So… what the FTX is going on? This time it’s different? It’s got a few traders feeling a little nervy about a potential “bull trap”…

https://twitter.com/Matthew76197677/status/1625951312054726656

It’s not just Bitcoin and crypto, though. Wall Street closed quite positively in the green overnight, with the S&P 500 up by 0.14% and Nasdaq by 0.68%.

Stockhead’s Eddy Sunarto has some ideas about what’s potentially playing out, as he details in his Market Highlights wrap this morning.

“Instead of a recession, it looks like the US economy will have a solid first quarter as retail sales jumped the most in two years in January,” wrote our resident macro/markets guru.

Meanwhile, delving further into the Cryptoverse, it’s not long before you stumble across those emanating high-octane optimism.

And yes, it could well be for engagement purposes, but here’s Crypto Zombie, who thinks Bitcoin might be ready to “truly shock the world”…

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.15 trillion, up about 7% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Well look at that, Bitcoin (BTC) is actually leading the majors for daily gains today, which is pleasing. In bullish surges of yore, an altcoin pump would often follow Bitcoin’s initial lead.

Tempering that statement somewhat… while Wells Fargo has come out and said that “the bear market is over” in stocks (which crypto is tightly correlated to), that doesn’t necessarily mean the bull market is immediately back on.

Here’s another prominent trader calling for caution – Gareth Soloway, speaking here with Aussie crypto YouTube and Twitter content creator Miles Deutscher. Soloway believes Bitcoin still has a ways to go before it truly bottoms out this year, but he’s bullish on it for 2024, while gold is his asset for 2023.

 

Continuing our flagging of wild swings of opinion spotted on Crypto Twitter, though, here’s another popular trader, who goes by the name of “Moustache”. In his view, BTC might have a “god candle” in its near future.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$11 billion to about US$475 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

DAILY PUMPERS

• Bitget Token (BGB), (market cap: US$646 million) +20%

• Render (RNDR), (mc: US$609 million) +17%

• Optimism (OP), (mc: US$604 million) +16%

• Mina Protocol (MINA), (mc: US$1 billion) +15%

• Rocket Pool (RPL), (mc: US$894 million) +10%

 

Not much slumping in the top 100 by market cap today. In fact, the only thing even slightly in the red at the time of writing is meme coin Baby Doge Coin (BABYDOGE), which is down a fraction of a percentage point.

Let’s take a look further down the market cap list to see what’s mooning right now – a place where only the boldest of crypto traders in this nervy market tend to tread…

• Conflux (CFX), (market cap: US$203 million) +64%

• Floki (FLOKI), (mc: US$360 million) +58%

• Blur (BLUR), (mc: US$331 million) +45%

• Lyra Finance (LYRA), (mc: US$64 million) +16%

 

Little-known project Conflux (CFX), which is a layer 1 blockchain that pitches itself as a kind of bridge between Western and Asian markets, has big partnership news. Conflux is reportedly a regulatory-compliant blockchain in China, and has apparently inked a significant partnership deal with China Telecom, according to the following tweet…

Meanwhile, Floki (FLOKI) is possibly still well up on this silly Elon Musk news from yesterday. And as for BLUR and LYRA, you can read about those on Stockhead in recent articles, too. Top Aussie fundie Apollo Crypto is particularly bullish on Lyra Finance.

 

Around the blocks

Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.

TLDR on SEC Commissioner Peirce’s statement on the SEC’s latest move on crypto – amending institutional crypto custody rulings: she doesn’t support it. It’s not as black and white as that, of course, but here’s a snippet from her long rationale:

“Significant aspects of the proposed approach and its implementation timeline, however, raise such great questions about the rule’s workability and breadth that I cannot support today’s proposal.”

Anyhoo… moving back to lighter subject matter…

And here’s “Ulti Crypto”, who spoke with Stockhead recently about his NFT short-selling project Dyve. Maybe he won’t be looking to short-sell Ethlizards NFTs any time soon?

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