Bitcoin (BTC) is seeing some notable light in a bearish tunnel as the new week began: its dominance is up around 17% in the midst of a selloff, while it’s also among those coins that fell the least in the past 7 days and from their all-time highs (ATHs).
At 7:25 UTC, BTC is trading at 36,461, after it went up nearly 1% in a day. It is, however, down 21% in a week and 28% over the past month.
Bitcoin, as is well known, is the first coin per market capitalization, with USD 682.3bn at this time. And amid the selloff, its percentage of total market capitalization, known as dominance, has gone up around 17% in 7 days, as many other crypto assets dropped against BTC.
More precisely, it increased from 39.1% recorded by Coinmarketcap.com on May 18 to 45.6% at the time of writing – meaning, it’s up by 6.5 percentage points. The highest it’s been in this period was 48.36% seen yesterday.
For context, BTC has been recording percentages in the 60s and low 70s since between January and March this year (and much higher before March 2017), sitting at 70% as 2021 began.
As for other coins in the top 10 by market capitalization, ethereum (ETH)’s dominance is the second-highest, standing today at 17.5%, down from 19% recorded on May 18. Others on the list have less than 4% each today, while the coins outside the top 10 have 19% dominance combined.
Furthermore, bitcoin is among the coins that dropped the least from their recently gained ATHs. It fell 43% in 40 days, from USD 65.028 (per Coinpaprika) seen on April 14.
The only top coin that dropped less is cardano (ADA) with nearly 40% in eight days since its ATH of USD 1.48. ETH follows BTC with a drop of 48% in a little less than two weeks, from USD 4,365, confirming previous warnings that ETH has “notably more downside risk.”
Other coins in the top 10 fell between 55% (dogecoin (DOGE)) and 78% (XRP), though XRP is the only coin on the list that didn’t hit an all-time high since 2018. Otherwise, bitcoin’s forty days is the longest timeframe on the list, while others hit their ATHs between eight and sixteen days ago.
Loan Venkatapen, the co-founder of Blocklabs Capital Management, told Bloomberg that while BTC “is not dying,” they still “expect productive blockchain assets such as Ethereum or Solana to challenge Bitcoin dominance in the coming months.”
Per Bloomberg, crypto hedge funds have been buying this latest dip, one of them being London-based investment manager MVPQ Capital. Its founder and CEO, Felix Dian, was quoted as saying that “we had kept dry powder,” and that they bought BTC at USD 35,000.
Charlie Erith, chief executive of ByteTree Asset Management, was quoted as saying that at USD 35,000, “We felt it’s a reasonable level at which to be adding,” noting that they don’t think “this is going to be a revisit of 2018,” when the prices crashed, even more, starting a crypto winter.
However, while investors spent some USD 410bn on BTC during this bull market, per blockchain analysis company Chainalysis data, USD 300bn of those positions were at a loss once BTC fell to USD 36,000.
“People that were borrowing money to invest, they were wiped from the system,” Kyle Davies, co-founder at Three Arrows Capital, told Bloomberg, adding that “every time we see massive liquidation is a chance to buy. […] I wouldn’t be surprised if bitcoin and ethereum retrace the entire drop in a week.”
Also, crypto financial services firm Amber Group noted today that they are seeing an unwind in smaller altcoins with rotation back into BTC and ETH.
“Crypto funds, macro funds, opportunistic [venture capitalists] beginning to buy this dip in BTC+ETH as well as blue-chip DeFi by staggering limit orders,” they said, adding that “buying is still relatively passive/measured at this moment.”
Meanwhile, in the past week, the question ‘should I buy bitcoin’ was googled on average three times more than ‘should I sell bitcoin’, per Google Trends. It has consistently been more popular than its selling counterpart.
According to Jeff Dorman, the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of investment management firm Arca, there are “1.5 / 3 factors that are still very bullish for risk assets, which probability-weighted, means there still should be buying power on the sidelines. The question is just when and how it gets deployed.”
These factors are:
- rates and the dollar still have not reacted, which is still very bullish for risk assets;
- institutional money was already slowing;
- The ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) narrative is unlikely to ever go away, with science unlikely to change people’s minds, and “this becomes more political theatre than substance.”
BTC, along with decentralized finance (DeFi), also disproportionately benefits from a coordinated government/regulatory attack on miners and exchanges, added Dorman.
Meanwhile, the three behaviors that often get investors (particularly hedge funds) in “trouble” are leverage, illiquid positions, and shorting.
For everyone else: stay solvent, pick your spots, trust your analysis, & keep your emotions in check.
Digital assets aren't going away today any more than they were curing cancer 2 weeks ago.
The answer is usually in the middle. Fortunes are made when emotions are too high pic.twitter.com/ZGuHu59NsQ
— Jeff Dorman, CFA (@jdorman81) May 23, 2021
(Photo : Mint)
