Bitcoin kicks off new quarter in the old $82,000-$85,000 price range
Bitcoin has begun the new quarter in the same range it spent much of the previous one, trading near $84,647.55 and stuck between $82,000 and $85,000, extending more than a week of choppy, sideways price action.
Prices briefly topped $85,000 on Wednesday after weaker-than-expected U.S. inflation cooled bets on Fed rate hikes, but bulls could not hold the move and spot ETFs did not help. U.S.-listed ETFs registered a net outflow of $148.7 million on Wednesday, ending a nine-day inflows streak that pulled in $3.08 billion, according to data source SoSoValue. That was the biggest inflow streak of the year in dollar terms.
The streak was already fading before it ended. Daily inflows peaked near $1 billion on Sept. 21 and steadily shrank over the following days. Analysts at Bitfinex said the pace of daily inflows needs to pick up for prices to continue rising. "Daily pace remains the key determinant for clearing overhead supply," they said in a market note. The Bitfinex Absorption-to-Emission Ratio (BAER), a metric that divides the BTC bought by ETFs in a session by the roughly 450 BTC miners produce each day, has compressed from 25.6x on 21 September to 1.8x on 29 September. "Absorbing the 1.39M BTC breakeven supply (which sits between $84,000 and $86,500) requires the BAER to recover toward 5.0x (~$190 million/day)," they said.
Macro factors were also in focus. Alex Kuptsikevich, chief analyst at The FxPro, said: "The persistence of the bond sell-off is a very worrying sign, capable of triggering a sell-off across all markets almost overnight." He said it is easy to find periods in history when turmoil in traditional finance has benefited crypto, but that it is impossible to predict when the market will shift from caution to panic.
Smaller coins were chalking out impressive gains in the meantime. Stacks' STX token, from the Bitcoin Layer 2 network, rose by 25% in 24 hours, while LIT, JST and ENA rose by over 5%. The broader altcoin story remains selective: the CoinDesk DeFi Select Index was the only one up 1% in 24 hours, with the Computing Select and CoinDesk 80 Indexes up 0.3% and 0.2% respectively, while the rest were slightly down.
