After hovering below $28,000 for five days, bitcoin started an unexpected journey upward, taking much of the rest of the market with it. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was recently trading at $28,300, up almost 3.7% in the last 24 hours. The surge’s sources were difficult to determine. BTC began rising less than 24 hours after troubled First Republic Bank revealed that it had lost $100 billion in deposits at its first-quarter earnings presentation on Monday, reigniting concerns about the viability of the banking system. Cryptos gained last month amid a string of regional banking collapses in the United States, as investors sought sanctuary in assets that keep their value.
“With First Republic Bank looking like it may fail, I suspect the market is expecting yet more liquidity injections to prop up what appears to be an American banking sector that is still very much in the throes of crisis,” Jake Boyle, director of Caleb & Brown, a retail crypto brokerage, wrote in an email to CoinDesk. “As a result, Bitcoin is outperforming these expectations.” Cracks in the financial system are appearing, albeit slowly, and it will be extremely difficult for the Fed to maintain its tightening regime in the future.”
“Bitcoin’s recent rally has more to do with liquidity injections and rising expectations that the Fed’s tightening will almost certainly have to end fairly soon, or else even greater turbulence in the banking sector could ensue,” Boyle noted.
According to Coinglass data, around $11.3 million in BTC short positions have been liquidated since 4 p.m. Short squeezes have typically accelerated price increases.
Ether was last trading at around $1,870, up 1.8% from Monday at the same time. Other prominent cryptocurrencies were mostly up, with SOL, the native token of the Solana blockchain, and ADA, the native coin of the Cardano smart contracts platform, both up more than 3% recently. The CoinDesk Market Index, which measures the overall performance of the cryptocurrency market, was up 2.6%.
The Nikkei and Hang Seng indexes were marginally down in early Asian trading. Stocks in the United States finished down, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite down about 2%.
CoinDesk analyst Glenn Williams said in his weekday column that at least two technical indications pointed to a bitcoin resurgence. BTC’s “recent decline accompanied an expected drop in momentum, but it also occurred in conjunction with a move towards the lower end of the Bollinger Band,” according to Williams. Bollinger Bands calculate two standard deviations above and below an asset’s 20-day moving average. The price of an asset is expected to stay within two standard deviations of the average 98% of the time, therefore a break above or below is significant.
“Bitcoin approaching the lower range of its Bollinger Bands raises questions about its near-term path,” Williams wrote, but he added that “given recent history, technical analysts could expect BTC prices to advance, albeit methodically, back to their 20-day average.”
