After the Bitcoin price reached a new annual high of $32,410 last Friday, June 23, the price rally has stalled for now. While the long-term outlook seems extremely optimistic due to several Bitcoin spot ETF filings, there are currently a few short-term reasons holding back a continuation for now.
Today, Wednesday, June 28, several negative messages weigh on market sentiment. First and foremost, the depegging of the fourth-largest stablecoin by market cap, TrueUSD (TUSD), may have upset investors. As a Bitcoinist reported earlier today, the latest revelations surrounding Prime Trust have raised new doubts that TUSD is fully backed by reserves.
Remarkably, TUSD is the most important trading pair (BTC/TUSD) in the whole market, with about 15% and $2.6 billion in trading volume on Binance in the last 24 hours. The rumors could have a negative impact, as evidenced by past stablecoin depeggings by USDT and USDC.
🚨 TUSD Depegging: Is Another Crypto Drama Unfolding?
1/@adamscochran raises several red flags:
– Certified accountant $TUSD audits (in Prime Trust) is the rebranded old FTX US auditor
– Oracle price is obtained from a single entity
– Bank partners are unknown— Jake Simmons (@realJakeSimmons) June 28, 2023
Another factor that is likely to negatively impact the price of Bitcoin is the behavior of Bitcoin miners. As Glassnode reports today, Bitcoin miners are currently experiencing extremely high interaction with exchanges, sending an all-time high of $128 million worth of BTC to exchanges, representing 315% of their daily earnings.
In an analysis today, CryptoQuant writes that miners have sent more than $1 billion in BTC to exchanges since June 15. About 33,860 BTC were sent to derivatives exchanges, although the majority flowed back into their own wallets. Miners saw a reduction in their reserves of about 8,000 BTC. Remarkably, only a small portion was sent to spot trading exchanges.
According to the on-chain experts, this could indicate that miners are using their newly minted coins as collateral when trading derivatives. A good example of this kind of trading is so-called ‘hedging’, where bets are made in the opposite direction of the market consensus.
Bitcoin is consolidating, more reasons
Market sentiment could also be weighed down by the record number of BTC options expiring on Friday, June 30. Traders may want to take a wait and see approach leading up to this. However, Greeks.Live analysts remark that institutions such as Fidelity and BlackRock continue to drive positive developments; the volume of BTC block calls now accounts for more than a third of the total volume.
“Both BTC and ETH are currently significantly above their maxpain points, but due to weak ETH prices, a large number of market makers have continued to sell ETH calls while buyers have focused more on BTC, causing ETH IV to fall. significantly lower than BTC,” the analysts say.
The market may also take a wait-and-see approach ahead of Friday’s release of Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) indices. “After a similar PCE report pushed BTC from $26k to $28k, we are waiting with bated breath. A positive PCE outcome could trigger a bullish uptrend in BTC,” said the co-founders of Glassnode (@Negentropic_) to write.
Last but not least, it should be noted that Bitcoin price is facing an extremely important USD 31,000 resistance area and consolidation is normal. After last week’s rapid rise, the daily RSI is still just below the overbought territory at 66.3.
As analyst @52Skew points out, BTC remains in tight consolidation, with price swings between supply and demand blocks. “4H/1D EMAs catch up with price and into key $29,000 area,” said analyst notes via Twitter and surmises, referring to Binance Open interest: “Pretty much still the same, chop chop. Eventually there will be a liquidity grab imo; which will probably lead to a fall.”
At the time of writing, Bitcoin price remained within its tight consolidation range.
Featured image from iStock, chart from TradingView.com