Where are we at, bulls and bears? It’s tense. Bitcoin is hanging in there as regulatory FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) intensifies. The US dollar meanwhile dipped a fraction overnight while US stocks rose a bit.

One thing to note, despite the increasing regulatory scrutiny and negative narratives being pushed here and there (looking at you SEC boss Gary Gensler, and IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva), BTC is actually up close to 5% over the past few days.

And there was some positive US inflation-data news yesterday, which may have flown under the radar. The US Commerce Department reported durable goods orders being down 4.5% in January versus the previous month.

Look, it’s something, and is just another number for the inflation bingo card. It’s still anyone’s guess regarding when an interest-rate-hike cool-off from the US Fed may occur in earnest.

So, that’s notsobad, in the very, very short term. But, as usual, we’ll grab a selection of analytical thoughts on this and that a bit further below to see what else we can lean on and ascertain.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.13 trillion, down about 0.4% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Flat City, for the most part in the majors today, although top L2 Ethereum scaler and popular gaming blockchain Polygon (MATIC) is down a tad more than the rest.

It’s not moved on any specific news we can immediately see, although on a brighter note, there are potential positive catalysts for MATIC coming up. Namely, the launch and integration of its much-awaited zk rollups scaling integration – Polygon zkEVM.

Polygon’s network growth and partnerships continue to surge, meanwhile, and MATIC is an increasingly popular coin with crypto whales (large holders) – which can be a good thing, but also a volatility thing in both directions.

Meanwhile, the Binance USD stablecoin (BUSD) continues to slip (right out of the top 10 cryptos by market cap). It’s just had some further crap news – a Coinbase delisting.

But onto the crypto market pacesetter in chief – Bitcoin (BTC).

The OG crypto asset is, for now, remaining there, or thereabouts, slightly above a supposedly critical level for potential bullish momentum. And yes, that is a ridiculously vague sentence.

But we’re basing it on the analysis we see from a few Crypto Twitter-housed traders, such as the popular, largely excellent chartist Rekt Capital, who has pinpointed the US$23,400 mark as a good monthly close-out figure to hit.

Rekt, which admittedly isn’t the most inspiring pseudonym, also says the following: “March is just around the corner Historically, BTC has broken out past its Macro Downtrend around 366-396 days before the Halving. This March, it will be ~396 days before the Halving.” 

Meanwhile, here’s something else for the positivity pipe. Some data from analytics gurus (via young analyst Will Clemente) that proves the Bitcoin HODLing faithful is as strong as ever.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$10.6 billion to about US$471 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

• NEM (XEM), (market cap: US$545 million) +46%

• Stacks (STX), (mc: US$1.25 billion) +16%

• SingularityNet (AGIX), (mc: US$534 million) +7%

• NEO (NEO), (mc: US$932 million) +6%

• Lido DAO (LDO), (mc: US$2.8 billion) +5%

 

Okay, here’s another wild pump based on no news. NEM (XEM), once a highly touted layer 1 blockchain back in the 2017/early ’18 bull run days of yore, has surged 46% over the past several hours.

And yet, like Defigram yesterday, there appears to be no fundamental reasons for this. In fact, a quick scour of the project’s Twitter account tells us that, unless you’re bullish on “Merry Christmas” tweets, there’s not a lot going on that’s sounding particularly pump worthy.

There is news of a “chain halt” outage on the NEM blockchain, however! Also not exactly pump-worthy, that.

Be careful out there.

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Klaytn (KLAY), (market cap: US$903 million) -6%

• WEMIX (WEMIX), (mc: US$568 million) -5%

• Conflux (CFX), (mc: US$473 million) -4%

• Quant (QNT), (mc: US$1.8 billion) -4%

• Optimism (OP), (mc: US$622 million) -4%

 

Around the blocks

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

Beware the ides of March?

Or are we going to follow a risk on, risk off, risk on monthly pattern this year…? Not sure the US trader Roman is so confident on that thought…

Charles Edwards, founder of the crypto-focused Capriole Fund, however, has pinpointed NINE reasons why he thinks Bitcoin is at the beginning of a bull market. He’s basing it on a combo of on-chain metrics, resilience beyond black swan events, positive historical timing regarding previous Bitcoin halvings, a shift in sentiment, and an approaching “macroeconomic regime change”.

 

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