Crypto Market Cap reclaims $1.1 trillion as Bitcoin Price Touches $24,000, Ethereum over $1700 & ETC Leads Altcoin Rally

So, the past week for the crypto market has been quite interesting. It started off on a moderately weak note, with uncertainty around the US Federal Reserve’s impending announcement of the interest rate hike. Almost all asset classes, including crypto were affected by this. But with the announcement coming in line with the general expectation of 75 basis points – all investment asset classes saw a rally.

US’ tech focused index, the Nasdaq rallied 5% since the announcement with S&P500 and the Dow Jones jumped 2.7% and 2% respectively. Even Indian indices managed to recover strongly on the back of the announcement with the Nifty50 and Sensex recovering almost 2% and still running. The crypto market also reacted very positively, with the overall market cap gaining well over 14% since the announcement.

However, in case of the crypto market, if we were to consider the entire week so far, it has only recovered about 8.5%, factoring in the slight dip that happened earlier on. This is much less that what the crypto market had managed to gain last week, which was almost about 15%!

Taking a look at individual coins, the king coin, Bitcoin only gained roughly the same amount as the broader crypto market but Ethereum managed to give extremely positive returns in this week. Despite the weakness earlier in the week, Ethereum on the back of excitement ahead of the Merge gained over 16% in the same timeframe. Bitcoin touched an intraday high of almost $24,100 while Ethereum has touched its intraday high of $1770, and is now trading close to $1730.

Some of the other altcoins that rallied include Ethereum Classic (ETC) which gained over 60% and Lido DAO token, which also managed to score over 50% in the past week. Other major altcoins include Qtum, Uniswap (UNI) and Synthetix (SNX) which gained 33%, 30% and 27% respectively in the same timeframe.

Additional Read: Ethereum Classic Price Prediction

Total Crypto Market Cap | Source: Tradingview

According to CoinMarketCap, the overall crypto market cap has even touched the $1.1 trillion mark as of 29 July, 2022. This marks a significant recovery, covering up the losses early in the week and then gaining some more. Overall now, the technical structure seems quite bullish as it has not immediate resistance until it reaches roughly the region between $1.16-1.33 trillion (marked in grey). This region would be an accumulation zone and prices would halt here for a while before resuming the rally.

CRYPTO MARKET AT $1.1 TRILLION: WEEKLY WRAP

*As on 29 July, 2022 – sourced from Tradingview, CoinMarketCap & DefiLlama

Check out latest Ethereum INR Price , Chart, and Data

WHY IS BITCOIN PRICE GOING UP?

BTC/USD | Source: Tradingview

Bitcoin over the past two days managed to recover all the ground it lost in the beginning of the week and managed to touch an intraday high of $24,000 on 29 July, 2022. It is now comfortably away from the support levels of 50-day moving average and the trendline support level (marked in blue). So as of now, Bitcoin’s road ahead seems open to a rally up to the accumulation zone (marked in grey) between $28,000-$32,000.

But until then, a rally from $24,000 to $28,000 for Bitcoin – would mark a further 16% rally going forward before Bitcoin would face any meaningful resistance. So this is a crucial factor for investors who bought amidst this upward move. Technically speaking, investors and traders do not have much to worry about as of now, until Bitcoin reaches $28,000 level.

Check Bitcoin to INR Price here

TOP CRYPTO MARKET NEWS OVER THE PAST WEEK

1. FED RATE HIKE DOES LITTLE TO OPPOSE MARKET OPTIMISM

Crypto markets have managed to retain and even gain market cap over the past two days since the announcement of the 75 basis point rate hike by the US Federal Reserve. Along with that, US’ shrinking GDP data has also failed to put a dent in the crypto market’s overall bullishness.

Read more on Fed Interest Rates Hike

2. UNISWAP GAINS OVER 140% FROM LOWS THANKS TO THIS

Uniswap, one of the largest decentralised exchanges is looking into the activation of protocol fees. This topic had been up for discussion several times before but had been turned down every single time. This time, discussions have been initiated again to create a way so as to efficiently activate protocol fees, to enable some gains out of running the Defi protocol.

3. STEP FINANCE ACQUIRES SOLANA FLOOR

Once a customer of SolanaFloor, Step Finance has acquired SolanaFloor to provide DeFi, and NFT Data insights. Step Finance is a Solana-based analytics platform with 110,000 monthly active users is now expanding its focus to provide accurate and up-to-date data from decentralised finance sectors and is going to also include NFTs too.

4. TETHER FINDS STABILITY FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 2 MONTHS

For the first time since the crash of Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin UST – Tether’s USDT has found stability for the first time in two months. The world’s largest stablecoin by market value regained its dollar peg on 20 July and has remained steady since then. This had been a cause for concern as right after the UST crash, Tether’s peg broke and the token fell to as low as 92 cents on some exchanges and maintained around 99 cents all through June 2022.

5. ETHEREUM MAINNET’S TENTH SHADOW FORK GOES LIVE

One of the top crypto projects to ever exist, Ethereum has been taking small steps for a while to better the blockchain. In its process to shift its energy exhaustive consensus mechanism, i.e. from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, the crypto asset is launching smaller testnets.  Taking yet another small but a very crucial step, Ethereum launched its 10th shadow fork. The process was supposed to be going to go live on July 28, 2022, however, the event took place early; a whole 26 hours ahead of time!

Read more: Ethereum Merge

TOP CRYPTO PRICES OVER THE WEEK

TOP GAINERS

TOP LOSERS

CRYPTO MARKET: THE WEEK AHEAD

Overall, the week ahead for the crypto market can be expected to be reasonably bullish, extrapolating from the current trajectory. Bitcoin is at one of the highest points in the past month and a half while Ethereum is quickly heading towards the psychological level of $2000 and could even attain it within the next two weeks if all things go well. Technical structures for most major coins are still sound after the recovery post the Fed rate hike announcement. So overall, things seem moderately bullish and long traders can expect profits on their books.

Prices as on 29 July, 2022.

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