Mooners and Shakers: MicroStrategy keeps buying BTC; Van Eck CEO says gold and Bitcoin in early bull cycle stage

Coinhead Rob Badman
MicroStrategy Bitcoin

Pic: Getty Images. Mad design skillz: Coinhead

Bitcoin and Ethereum are the crypto majors to watch right now. As ever, really. While several analysts seem divided about what happens next on the charts, at least two prominent figures are bullish.

One of them is MicroStrategy. You know, the US software company founded by the absolute bull goose of all Bitcoin moon boys, Michael Saylor.

It’s announced yet another large purchase of everyone’s favourite orange-coloured crypto – 1,045 coins, which is about US$29.3 million worth of the asset.

MicroStrategy has now spent a total of US$4.1 billion on Bitcoin, which makes it the public company with the largest stash of BTC globally.

Jan van Eck, the CEO of US$69 billion New York-based global investment manager Van Eck, certainly believes holding both gold and Bitcoin is a good idea right now, proposing that both are at the early stages of a multi-year bull cycle.

In an interview with CNBC (see below), Van Eck said:

“I think we’re at the very beginnings of what could be a several-year cycle and gold and I also put Bitcoin in that category as well. I mean you have to love that finally as a gold investor, you’ve been rewarded over the last couple of weeks. Weakness in the banking system and gold rally. That’s why you own gold.”

“At some point, the Fed will start this easing cycle and you will want [Bitcoin] in your portfolio,” added the CEO. “Short term there might be pullbacks and it might be a sideways year for this asset as well. But I do think when the cycle turns, it could be pretty exciting.”

“PlanB”, the creator of the well-known Bitcoin Stock-to-Flow chart, agrees with him.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.24 trillion, up 0.6% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Bitcoin is hanging in there above US$28k still, although it has pulled back a jot since late last night (AEDT) when it was threatening to make a break for the $29k checkpoint. It wasn’t to be, which now has some analysts shaking their heads and muttering something about a “double top” formation.

Here’s one, the widely followed “Credible Crypto”, urging caution right now, and pointing to past “bearish divergence” formations and slowing momentum that ended in a Bitcoin dip.

Likewise, another prominent analyst, Justin Bennett, also thinks a BTC dip to the “range lows” of around US$20k is inevitable.

Bennett added that he believes that the likelihood is strong that the crypto market will pull back in order to liquidate a build-up of long positions.

“Whether we see another push to $30,000 or not, it’s only a matter of time before BTC sweeps the $20,000 lows, in my opinion. It’s just the nature of the beast,” he wrote.

Not everyone is feeling so bearish right now, of course. Here’s Dutch trader Michaël van de Poppe…

And here’s Aussie Crypto Twitterer “tedtalksmacro”, who has been pointing to the “Path to Altseason” chart just lately.

https://twitter.com/tedtalksmacro/status/1643741489477083136

Hmm, Bitcoin has been performing well all year, up near +70% in 2023… and now Ethereum has been outperforming BTC over the past week in the lead-up to the April 12 Shanghai network upgrade. So far so good for that chart above, then.

It’s clearly a tough market to read right now, however, and whodahell knows (apart from Jerome Powell and pals) what the US Federal Reserve is going to do next? A cautious approach might not be the worst tactic, still.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$8 billion to about US$446 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.)

PUMPERS

• Klaytn (KLAY), (market cap: US$828 million) +21%

• Trust Wallet (TWT), (mc: US$527 million) +7%

• GMX (GMX), (mc: US$685 million) +6%

• Flow (FLOW), (mc: US$1.05 billion) +4%

• The Sandbox (SAND), (mc: US$1.19 billion) +5%

 

SLUMPERS

• Kaspa (KAS), (market cap: US$540 million) -14%

• Stacks (STX), (mc: US$1.17 billion) -3%

• Synthetix Network (SNX), (mc: US$849 million) -2%

• Quant (QNT), (mc: US$1.76 billion) -2%

• Chainlink (LINK), (mc: US$3.77 billion) -2%

 

Around the blocks

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

A moment in time for you – on or around this day in 1933, as pointed out by PlanB again…

And if some of those bearish analysts mentioned above have got you concerned about a potential dip, then you might like this level of bullishness to stack in your hopium pipe instead.

Jesse Myers, a US hedge fund  manager, has mapped out Bitcoin’s path to US$10 million per BTC and claims “we have begun the Bitcoin era”.

 

 

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