Bitcoin futures tapped $50,000 on February 16 but failed to clinch the magic support level as one analyst predicted a $4 trillion end-of-year market cap.
Data from price trackers including CoinMarketCap and TradingView showed BTC/USD attempting to crack $50,000 during Tuesday trading but being held back by a wall of sellers.
Bitcoin at $50,000—gradually, then suddenly
After several attempts to leave the $40,000 trading corridor, Bitcoin saw rejection as the spot market hit around $49,780. Futures still managed to breach the $50,000 mark before a correction set in, that in itself lasting only hours before a final push sent the market to a peak of $50,600.
At press time, BTC/USD was fluctuating around $49,100 amid a lack of clear direction as $50,000 came and went successively. The reason, it seemed, was that whales were still accumulating while sellers kept the market from going higher.
According to data from Coinbase, the exchange’s premium stayed negative this week, making it cheaper for large-volume buys than Binance.
“Negative Coinbase premium, but plentiful stablecoins in exchanges. Negative premium should be cooled down to get another leg up,” Ki Young Ju, CEO of analytics resource CryptoQuant, explained.
Ki added that despite this, stablecoin balances across exchanges were higher than ever, indicating that liquidity was present to pile into a given asset.
“50K is such a tease. Let’s do this already. $BTC,” popular trader Scott Melker added.
A $4 trillion asset by 2022
While traders waited for decisive action, those zooming out were still more than satisfied with the perspectives Bitcoin provided.
For statistician Willy Woo, it all hinged on the number four trillion.
“Number of the day: 4,000,000,000,000,” he tweeted on the day.
“$4T of cash sitting in US non-financial corporations. $4T is also Gold’s financial cap. $4T is also #Bitcoin’s projected cap for end of this year on current models.”
Woo added that price aside, Bitcoin’s performance as a store of value makes it the ideal solution for the average consumer who has seen wages stagnate for the past sixty years. He referenced a study by Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal, who suggested that while the real state of the economy—booming stocks, for example—was not as bad as many think, wages were by far the thorn in the side of the status quo.
“Or another way is look at how many hours work it takes to buy an ounce of gold…Wages allow you no investment opportunity,” he said in a series of tweets this week.
“…You could interpret BTC as a bubble. You could suggest is hasn’t reached its full price discovery as many adopt it as their life raft as Metcalfe’s Law kicks in. Either way, it dramatically offsets the wages/purchasing power/denominator issue. It is the only chance people have.”
