Bitcoin Crash Alert: From ETF Boost To $42K Drop, A Turbulent Week In Crypto Market!

This week comes as a highly volatile one for the crypto market, quite early in the year 2024. As one of the main expectations fueling the high anticipations of a bullish market in 2024, the Bitcoin Spot ETFs dream comes true. 

However, the often-known to react quickly crypto market maintains the volatility of deep waters and takes a plunge at the end. With the market turning red over the weekends, let’s find out what went wrong in a week where a decade-long dream comes true but fails to do justice. 

To know more about the potential price trend of Bitcoin in 2024 and the upcoming years, check out our BTC price prediction. 

Bitcoin’s Volatile Week Takes A Bearish Turn

Starting the report on a positive note, Bitcoin started the week close to $44K following last week’s recovery of 3.99%. Borrowing the last week’s momentum, Bitcoin bounced 6.94% on Monday to reach the $47K mark. 

However, the BTC price trend quickly lost bullish momentum, leading to a sideways struggle with long-range candles reflecting high volatility. And then came the good news of the SEC approving all the Bitcoin Spot ETFs. 

Bitcoin’s price reached the top of $47,500 following the decision on Wednesday. The trend saw a bullish trend continuation in the first half of Thursday. As Bitcoin ETFs loaded up around $4.6 billion in volumes, the BTC price topped at $49,048 on Thursday. 

After the initial excitement wore off, Bitcoin reversed course, as market observers said that the hundreds of millions in volumes driven by Grayscale’s Bitcoin ETF were likely driven by sellers.

With this news, BTC price fell to a low of $45,700, pre-ETF approval levels, before closing slightly above $46K on Thursday. 

In short, the volatility on Thursday led to almost $40M liquidations on each side. 

On Friday, Bitcoin (BTC) experienced a significant dip, falling below the $42,000 mark. This marked a steep decline of nearly 10%, signaling a sharp turnaround from the initial excitement sparked by the recent approval of Bitcoin ETFs. The downfall leads to a significant rise in long liquidation of $271 Million, as per Coinglass.  

The reversal continues to have a bearish effect on Saturday as the weekly trading volumes reflect a rise in selling volume. Bitcoin prices are struggling to regain a solid footing as it shows a 0.74% recovery. However, the prevailing bearish engulfing candle in the daily chart warns of a continuation of downfall. 

In the weekly chart, the BTC price shows a bullish failure to cross the 61.80% Fibonacci level and delays the rounding bottom breakout. As the selling pressure grows, the 50% Fibonacci level is under stress and warns of a breakdown below $40K. 

Altcoins Analysis

As the volatile week turns bearish for Bitcoin, the altcoins are slowing down the bullish rally. However, the major coins are sustaining a growth this week. Ethereum is up by 14%, The Graph by 6.92%, Cardano by 11.54%, and hard forks like Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic by 12.35% and 49.52%, respectively. 

Memecoins like the DOGE and SHIB show an upside move of 2.81% and 8.31% this week. This reflects a potential trend continuation in the coming week if Bitcoin stabilizes the trend above $40K. 

Let’s head to the top performers and the top losers of the week. 

Ethereum Name Service trading at $23.54 with a growth of 83.28% this week ranks as the top performer in the Top 100 coins. Coming in second, SUI trades at $1.28 with a weekly growth of 49.75% and Ethereum Classic at the third with a 49.52% jump. 

Looking at the slow performers, Polygon (MATIC) trades at $0.8747 with a weekly return of 7.56% ranks lowest amidst market-wide recovery. Fetch.ai (FET) comes in as the second least performing altcoin this week with 7.59% jump and trades at $0.6839. Lastly, Decentraland (MANA) at $0.4734 finds a growth of 7.85% this week.  

DeFi Market Analysis

The Total DeFi market cap has increased by 10.74% this week and shows a bullish trend continuation of the recovery started in October 2023. The Total Value Locked comes at $56.11 Billion, a significant jump from $56.82Billion last week. Moreover, the volume in the DeFi sector more than doubles from $3.1Billion to $6.92Billion. 

Ethereum takes a huge chunk of the DeFi market’s TVL with $31.299 Billion, with Tron and BSc taking $8.04B and $3.52B. 

Amongst the recovering DeFi sector, the Jito, a liquidity provider to the Solana ecosystem is a top performer with a 39% jump. Coming in after Jito are Maker(MKR) and Rocket Pool(RPL) with a return of 18.64% and 15.89% in the last week. 

NFT market

The Non-Fungible Tokens market finds a bearish week as the total sales are down by 26%, recording at 332,939 and an overall market cap of $4.54B. The loss of volume is supported by a drop in Sales volume of 14%, accounting at $263M. 

The top NFT sales in the last 7 days are Anchor on Secret at $1.41M, Mars on Binance Smart Chain at $1.29M and finally CryptoPunk #8639 from CryptoPunks at $227k.