Bitcoin continued its revival which began late Sunday.
Bitcoin was recently trading at about $22,896, up more than 9% over the past 24 hours. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was chopping in a tight range between $18,000-$22,000 but recently broke out and pushed through the $22,000 resistance.
Although this seems bullish, market observers are refraining from being overly optimistic, given the current macro environment of rising inflation, central bank uncertainty, and the likelihood of a recession.
Hassan Bassiri, VP of portfolio management for asset management firm Arca, told CoinDesk “I’m bullish in the near-term of like a week or two, but after that, you have to be cautious because you still have all these macroeconomic headwinds, and you still have no new capital flowing into the space. It’s just us trading against each other.”
“When Apple news came out, the market immediately pulled back (referring to the major equity indexes finishing slightly in the red after Apple announced that it would decrease its spending and hiring), so there’s still a strong correlation with traditional markets. But crypto is starting to decouple on a short-term basis. So it’s very challenging to say with a lot of competence what is going to happen because the market is very player versus player”, added Bassiri.
MMCrypto speculated in a recent YouTube video that if the price of BTC broke through $22,500 then there is a very high probability of the price going up to $30,000 or even $40,000. With the price going above $22,800 on Monday, we see the price of BTC perched above the $18,000-$22,000 range it has occupied for over a month now.
Ethereum’s price hit one month high one month prior to its potential merge date.
A tweet was posted by Tim Beiko (who’s an Ethereum Foundation member) on July 14th, 2022 in which he gave the Ethereum community a brief agenda of Ethereum’s major future development including its potential merge date which is September 19th. In that tweet, he also stated that “This merge timeline isn’t final, but it’s extremely exciting to see it coming together. Please regard this as a planning timeline and look out for official announcements!”
This merge will change the Ethereum consensus mechanism from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
Since Beiko’s announcement, Ethereum has registered huge gains that peaked at around $1600 today. The biggest jump since March.
Several observers consider Ethereum’s transition equivalent to three Bitcoin halvings, which will lead to a 90% reduction in ether’s annual issuance. This means the transition is likely to bring a store of value or deflationary appeal to ether.
