The anticipation of Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell’s upcoming remarks about inflation and the economy led to more cryptocurrency anxiety on Wednesday.
Bitcoin and Ether traded sideways. Recently, Bitcoin was trading at around $21,500, up less than a percent from the previous day. The flagship crypto has been tenaciously holding onto its handhold above $21,000 despite generally weak trade as investors wait for more clarification regarding the future course of the U.S. central bank’s monetary policy.
For the day, 33,592 traders were liquidated, the total liquidations come in at $84.47 million. The largest single liquidation order happened on Binance – BTCUSDT value $872.34K.
At least for the time being, this week has not seen the same level of dramatic volatility as last week, which caused bitcoin to drop by more than $4,000 in a couple of days.
The most recent significant drop in price occurred over the weekend when BTC plunged to a three-week low of $20.8K on the Binance market.
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Outlook
- Bitcoin is probably in for more hardship in the future. A weekly chart momentum indicator, which is likely to flash the first bearish signal in more than three years, is sending this message.
- In a week or two, Bitcoin’s 50-week simple moving average (SMA), which is now drifting downward, is expected to cross below the 100-week SMA, marking the first bearish crossover since February 2019.
- The forthcoming bearish cross should, in principle, indicate a deepening of the bearish momentum, but the signal has a flawless track record of catching sellers on the wrong side of the market, similar to the negative SMA crossing that was confirmed on the three-day chart last month.
- The price of ether recently traded below $1.7K while increasing by more than 1% at the same time. In recent weeks, the second-largest crypto by market value has outperformed bitcoin due to the much anticipated Ethereum blockchain Merge, which will change the protocol from energy-guzzling proof-of-work to quicker, more environmentally friendly proof-of-stake.
