Bitcoin’s price is slightly above last week’s level. Altcoins are mostly on the red, but nothing serious. The past seven days have been relatively quiet on the market. The DeFi rankings are also unchanged.
Bitcoin’s price stayed above an important support level
Bitcoin’s price is $44,300 at the time of writing this article. The price was $43,800 a week ago, which means there has been very little development. The past week was pretty quiet when considering the volatile year 2022 so far.
The graph below shows Bitcoin’s price development from the previous six months. It also includes the 50-day (blue) and the 200-day (purple) moving averages.
We had a positive view about Bitcoin’s price development a week ago. There was a strong move upward where Bitcoin also broke several key resistance levels. One of these was the 50-day moving average.
At the end of the last week, Bitcoin’s price dropped slightly to test this level as support. Investors were following closely whether the 50-day moving average held or not. It did, and Bitcoin took a nice bounce and began a new move upwards.
Next, let’s look at the Heikin Ashi candles we introduced a week ago. They give a strong signal of the ongoing trend when we use the weekly time frame. Heikin Ashi candles filter out some of Bitcoin’s price volatility.
As you can see, the uptrend is still very strong. Bitcoin is building a third consecutive green candle in a row. The short downtrend we saw last week didn’t change this picture.
Bitcoin looked quite strong last week when considering the pressure it had from external factors.
The U.S. published new inflation numbers of 7.5 percent. This (January) is half a percentage point move higher from the December number. The inflation also beat investors’ estimates. One of the Fed chairs, James Bullard, also spooked markets by expressing his views of the importance of the rate hikes.
Jerome Powell’s job is probably one of the least wanted ones on the planet right now.
Fed's Bullard says:
1) the Fed's credibility is on the line
2) Rate hike timing is Powell's responsibilityin other words, if we screw this up, it's Powell's fault.
— Hedgeye (@Hedgeye) February 14, 2022
Stock markets have also shown weakness due to geopolitical tensions. The market had a significant drop last Friday when the threat of Russia’s attack against Ukraine became stronger. Bitcoin seemed to hold its price better than the rest of the market.
The overall situation is somewhat neutral right now. The stock market is above the January lows, but there are so many risks out there starting from the Fed rate hikes to geopolitical pressures. Bitcoin has looked quite strong in the past weeks. Nothing suggests we’d go back to January lows in the near future.
We are still quite positive when it comes to February. The true test, however, will come later this spring when the Fed takes the punch bowl away.
Major altcoins are on the red vs. Bitcoin
Let’s look at the altcoin market. The situation looks very similar to the previous week, meaning that Bitcoin has performed better than the biggest altcoins. Bitcoin’s dominance has also risen about 0.7 percentage points to 43.8%.
There were four top-15 currencies that outperformed Bitcoin a week ago. This time there is just one: Avalanche. All other major coins are on the red compared to Bitcoin.
The poor performance is partly explained by the measuring point. Altcoin prices were surging exactly seven days ago and went lower when the week progressed. If we look at the past 24 hours, most top 15 coins are up 5%-15% in U.S. dollar terms.
When we browse the top 100 list further down it must be said that the altcoin market looks quite boring. There are typically a couple of rockets out there. This week there is just coin up more than 20% in dollar terms: Unus sed leo.
The reason why LEO is moving is the Bitfinex hack we wrote about in the news article. LEO is the token launched by the Bitfinex exchange. There is an interesting point in its white paper that has made investors speculate.
iFinex and its subsidiaries will use an amount equal to at least 80% of the recovered net funds from the Bitfinex hack …. to repurchase and burn outstanding LEO tokens.
If Bitfinex were to get the stolen bitcoins back it could use up to 80% of the funds to buy back LEO tokens and burn them. This would obviously give a massive boost to the remaining tokens. However, it is nowhere near certain Bitfinex will get the stolen bitcoins back anytime soon. This is just pure speculation.
DeFi TVL has gone slightly down
The DeFi sector has mirrored the altcoin market in the past week. The liquidity of the DeFi market has dropped from 220 billion (last week) to 208 billion dollars.
This number is just 10 percent higher than the bottom in January. It means that the DeFi sector has recovered much slower than Bitcoin. As a comparison, Bitcoin is up 33% from the January lows.
The slow week in DeFi shows very well at the protocol level. There have been no position changes during the previous seven days. Changes in TVL have also been somewhat marginal.
There haven’t been any changes in the blockchain rankings either. Avalanche was showing strength in the weekend since it moved up to second place momentarily. The ranking has been restored, though. Avalanche is again back to fourth place where it was a week ago.
There is nothing major to report from the DeFi sector this week. When we look at the blockchain rankings in a time frame of 30 days, there are three chains that stand out in terms of TVL rise: Fantom (12.5%), Crypto.com’s Cronos (29.1%), and Polkadot (55.3%). You should keep an eye on these projects in the near future.