Bitcoin saw further ranging below $36,000 on January 13 as chart action caused one exchange to prepare traders for the “next bull run.”
Data from price trackers including CoinMarketCap and TradingView saw a comparatively uneventful 24 hours for Bitcoin in which the largest cryptocurrency maintained a trading corridor above $30,000 support.
This week saw another conspicuous U-turn on Bitcoin, this time from from former skeptic Howard Marks, co-chairman of the $140 billion asset manager Oaktree Capital. In his own client note on Monday, Marks said that the “innovation” of Bitcoin had caused him to reconsider his stance since he called it a “pyramid scheme” in 2017.
“While the story is far from fully written, the least I can say is that my skeptical view has not borne out to date,” he summarized, adding that he was “thankful” his son already owned BTC.
BTCC: Whales don’t want to sell
The previous day had seen a top of $36,700 before Bitcoin’s record recovery from Monday’s lows lost steam and sideways trading returned.
At press time, no obvious price focus was evident, with BTC/USD moving within all areas of the corridor. Among trading circles, however, anticipation of fresh volatility was already building.
In a note to clients on Wednesday, Chinese exchange BTCC said that the past few days had laid the foundations for upside to once again take over the market.
“Bitcoin remains a strong bullish sentiment as the top 100 richest addresses kept accumulating more than 350,000 BTC in the last 30 days according to the on-chain data,” it read.
“Furthermore, it has found a consolidated support level at $33,000. It is expected that the next bull run is coming as the Big Whale doesn’t seem to decrease their Bitcoin holding.”
Numbers support institutional buyer narrative
BTCC was referencing the movements of large amounts of bitcoins from small to large investors which continued this week, those “millionaire” wallets increasing in numbers as lower-value wallets sold off. In addition to this “spawning” of new whales, exchange data reinforced the narrative of institutional investors piling into Bitcoin in the low $30,000 zone.
“There are many institutional investors who bought $BTC at the 30-32k level. The Coinbase outflow on Jan 2nd was a three-year high,” Ki Young Ju, CEO of on-chain analytics service CryptoQuant, highlighted to Twitter followers on Wednesday.
“Speculative guess, but if these guys are behind this bull-run, they’ll protect the 30k level. Even if we have a dip, it wouldn’t go down below 28k.”
While Coinbase Pro, the professional counterpart of retail giant Coinbase, posted huge volume spikes, the co-founder of fellow exchange Gemini confirmed that interest was overwhelmingly not being made public.
In a Twitter exchange, Tyler Winklevoss berated gold bug and Bitcoin naysayer Peter Schiff after the latter claimed that institutions were not in fact buying the cryptocurrency. He retorted:
“This is completely false. There is huge institutional demand and most of it is silent. As the operator and proprietor of @Gemini I would actually know, you would not.”
