Bitcoin is showing strength again today, inching back up above US$27.5k and in sight of the promised land of greener $28k pastures. Jeez, maybe this thing has legs after all.

We like gold here at Stockhead, but one thing seems to get lost in the mix… Bitcoin, which some/many also consider a store of value, continues to outrageously outperform the yellow metal.

BTC is up 60% so far this year, whereas the price of gold has now pretty much retraced any/all gains it’s made this year. In fact, if you’ve only held gold in 2023, you’d be down 0.28%. Sobering.

Seller exhaustion on BTC? HODLers digging in? We’d like to think so. And so we will. But here are some TwittererX-ers with some posts to partially back up the sentiment…

Also, let’s not leave the no.2 crypto (and no, that doesn’t mean it’s a sh*tcoin) Ethereum out of the equation. Because, according to the blockchain data analytics gurus Santiment, it, too, is seeing a significant amount of outflow off exchanges.

Yesterday was apparently the largest flow in that direction for ETH since August 21. This is a good sign, why? Very simply, ETH and BTC on exchanges means whales (big investors) are gearing up to sell. Off exchanges, means they’re settling in to HODL.

And further to that, there’s this, too. Increasing stablecoin inflow to exchanges is only helping the positive narrative right now…

 

Top 10 overview

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

Hmm, look, Dogecoin is back in the Top 10 cryptos by market cap. Hang on, it was there yesterday, too.

In any case, Elon Musk’s favourite coin, as stoopid as it might seem, is one to watch… especially as Musk owns X and has plans to turn it into a payments platform/everything app, and frequently says things like: “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely” along with comments such as:

 

Uppers and downers

Some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

 PUMPERS (11-100 market cap position)

• Trust Wallet (TWT), (market cap: US$379 million) +13%

• Avalanche (AVAX), (market cap: US$3.55 billion) +9%

• Mina Protocol (MINA), (market cap: US$389 million) +8%

• Chainlink (LINK), (market cap: US$4.27 billion) +4%

• Injective (INJ), (market cap: US$639 million) +4%

 

SLUMPERS

• Rollbit Coin (RLB), (market cap: US$493 million) -9%

• Radix (XRD), (market cap: US$543 million) -7%

• Toncoin (TON), (market cap: US$647 million) -4%

 

Around the blocks

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

On Capitol Hill in the States, earlier…

And some scenes from the Lower House…

 

It all makes perfect sense when you think about it, and that tiger-scared Floridian Republican Matt Gaetz – he really should’ve paid for dinner.

US politics, eh? Interesting times. If you’ve been keeping half an eye, you’ll know by now that, as Christian put it earlier in the Market Highlights column, Republicans in the Lower House trolled and then removed their own Speaker – Kevin McCarthy.

He’ll be, likely temporarily at least, replaced by another Republican Macca – the bow-tie-wearing, Gary-Gensler-grilling Patrick McHenry. Who, if you like Bitcoin and Ethereum, is somewhat of an innovation-friendly, free-markets champ (ahem, left/right political directional preferences aside).

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