Bitcoin (BTC) returned to $60,000 on April 10 as a bout of long overdue volatility hit the market in line with analysts' expectations.
"Being a bear is expensive"
Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed a sudden push allowing BTC/USD to exit the $50,000 corridor overnight on Friday.
The move had been weeks in the making — a convincing attack on $60,000 resistance, the last before all-time highs, had previously failed to materialize before.
Bitcoin is about to Bitcoin. ⤴️ $BTC pic.twitter.com/8IY19LdtmB
— Alex Saunders (@AlexSaundersAU) April 7, 2021
Now seemend different, however, with Bitcoin going on to pass $61,000 before consolidating at around $60,650 at the time of writing.
"$163,745,606 of Bitcoin shorts liquidated in an hour," quant analyst Lex Moskovski noted on Twitter as the market turned.
"While Bitcoin is grinding up to another ATH. Being a bear is expensive."
The picture was indeed a surprising one for traders who had spent weeks in a sideways market which occasionally tapped multi-week lows.
The impetus behind the latest rise was still to become clear on Saturday, as was the true extent of its staying power given the importance of $60,000 as a psychological support level to capture.
One notable change was funding rates across exchanges, which had decreased markedly in previous days, translating to reduced friction at and above $60,000 before spiking as the market rose higher.
No hint of a market top
Some had nonetheless called for an optimistic take on the market setup this week. Among them was Filbfilb, co-founder of trading suite Decentrader, who stated that Bitcoin at $58,000 had a lot in common technically with Bitcoin at $20,000.
"I'm still very bullish above 58K. Structure the same as at 20K IMO; a lot of other market nuances similar too in orderflow and depth," he told subscribers of his Telegram trading channel on Friday.
A day earlier, fellow Decentrader analyst Philip Swift had voiced similar leanings, using the upcoming cross of two important moving averages to suggest that BTC/USD had further to run.
These were the 111-day and 350-day moving averages, the latter multiplied by two, together known as a Pi Cycle.
"My current near-term market outlook for Bitcoin is neutral-bullish, so my personal view is that there is a good probability this is not the market cycle top for Bitcoin when the Pi Cycle Indicator moving averages cross in a few day’s time," Swift wrote in a market update.
"Other indicators and fundamentals are suggesting that we are not yet at the end of the market cycle."
Others agreed but were slightly more cautious, including statistician Willy Woo, who on Friday warned that Bitcoin could be finishing the first of a "double top" price construction.
"Volatility is visibly lower this cycle," he summarized, adding that once cleared, the $1 trillion market cap level — corresponding to a Bitcoin price of around $53,600 — would "unlikely" be broken again.