Resilient Bitcoin Rebounds Above $24K Despite Investors’ Inflation, Labor Market Concerns

The price of bitcoin fluctuated between $24,000 and $24,000 on Thursday as investors continued to assess the U.S. central bank’s ongoing discussion over monetary policy and jobs statistics that suggested inflation would continue to be a problem.

The biggest cryptocurrency was recently trading at $24,052, down 0.4% over the previous day but still far from its week-earlier peak of almost $25,000. Despite this, economists are cautiously optimistic about BTC’s potential after witnessing its 40% increase at the beginning of the year amid a more favorable general economic environment.

According to Bradley Duke, co-CEO of institutional-grade digital asset-backed securities provider ETC Group, “people feel that the worst may be over in terms of the bad news that we had in the crypto sector last year, and that’s why it’s [Bitcoin] more resilient.” Duke made this statement to CoinDesk’s “First Mover” program.

Julius de Kempenaer, the senior technical analyst at research platform Stockcharts.com, said he was pleased by bitcoin’s ability to hold support at higher levels in recent months, particularly its most recent perch at $24,000, in a separate interview with CoinDesk TV. We can put in a low here and break through 25k, which is a signal to go up to that 30k region, as long as we stay around that level, where we are currently, according to de Kempenaer.

The price of ether was recent $1,659, up almost 1.1%. AVAX, the token of layer 2 platform Polygon, and MATIC, the token of base-layer network Avalanche Network, both fell by roughly 3% and 2.5%, respectively, while other major cryptocurrencies were flat, but slightly colored in red. Hours after cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said it was constructing its layer 2 blockchain using the OP Stack in partnership with the protocol, OPT, the native cryptocurrency of layer 2 scaling tool Optimism, was up more than 6%.

The performance of the digital asset market is gauged by the CoinDesk Market Index (CMI), which fell 0.2%.

The technology-heavy S&P 500 gained 0.5% to snap a four-day losing run, while the tech-focused Nasdaq and Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) also gained a few hundredths of a percentage point. Stock prices increased overall. The semi-conductor manufacturer Nvidia gave the Nasdaq hope when it declared on Wednesday that it anticipated better sales as a result of the excitement surrounding the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chat platform. After the public debut of the chatbot ChatGPT and the image-creation program Dall-E in mid-2022, the value of AI tokens has increased.

Initial jobless claims for the week ending February 18 decreased by 3,000 to 192,000, although they were still below the consensus expectation of 200,000, according to the U.S. Labor Department. The U.S. Federal Reserve has struggled with strong jobs data as it attempts to bring inflation down from 6.4% to its target rate of 2%. Risk-taking investors are being cautious due to the continued anxiety over high prices.

The cryptocurrency news was inconsistent on a busy day. Powerhouse venture capital firms a16z led a $25 million Series B, CoinDesk reported. A $10 million investment was made by Pantera in Worldwide Webb, the maker of a pixel art-based metaverse game, and another investment was made in Here Not There to help develop Towns, a Web3 group chat protocol and app that enables online communities to create blockchain-based gatherings completely decentralized. Nevertheless, federal law enforcement officials increased the charges against Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and NFT platform Dapper Labs said that it was firing 20% of its staff less than four months after making a 22% headcount reduction.