Bitcoin is closing out the week on a positive note as anticipation builds of the BTC price bull run continuing.
Despite the past few days being dominated by altcoin growth, the mood is once again turning in favor of a Bitcoin revival after several weeks of sideways trading.
Modern Consensus takes a look back at recent events and considers what may lie ahead for Bitcoin traders this weekend. We also publish a markets forecast every Monday, the latest edition of which you can find here.
Altcoins steal the show
Monday began with the fallout from retail investors’ takedown of shorters on traditional markets. As regulators caught on and trading platforms shut down access to certain stocks, Bitcoin proponents swiftly stepped in to highlight the comparative freedom inherent in Bitcoin markets.
Fresh from a public endorsement from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who added Bitcoin to his Twitter biography, the largest cryptocurrency seemed like a sure bet as the next battleground against shorters.
In the event, however, Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets group turned its attention to silver and meme-based altcoin Dogecoin.
The latter is also a favorite plug of Musk, and its fortunes were turned around as huge trade volume accompanied a rush to new all-time highs.
Bitcoin, however, stayed broadly flat. Even as Musk stated in a live interview that he is a “supporter,” BTC/USD failed to put in anything like the performance of many altcoins. A subsequent move saw Musk remove Bitcoin from Twitter while adding to the fervor around DOGE.
Also setting records was largest altcoin Ether, which beat its own all-time highs on the back of fierce trading volume on DeFi markets and the prospect of an upcoming futures launch.
Thursday saw $1,700 appear for the first time before a modest correction sparked a day’s consolidation.
The popular trader Josh Rager summarized it like this:
“It’s a 7% pullback after a week of over 40% gains and new all-time high. It’s going to be okay, no need to hide under the bed just yet.”
Stone Ridge CEO: “I know” the money is coming for Bitcoin
With altcoin fervor in full swing, Bitcoin thus needed a kick, and it at press time, that appears to be coming from familiar sources.
MicroStrategy, the company with over 70,000 BTC ($2.6 billion) to its name, has seen unprecedented interest and attendance after beginning its dedicated Bitcoin conference this week.
After several days of sessions, CEO Michael Saylor predicted that considerable corporate funds would flow into Bitcoin this year, with asset manager Stone Ridge CEO Ross Stevens seconding the sentiment.
In a conversation with Saylor at the conference at the conference, Stevens added:
“You’re just going to see a wall of money. I know it, I have an order book. A wall of money coming into the asset class.”
No sooner had the exchanges taken place did withdrawals on professional trading platform Coinbase Pro show fresh spikes, indicating that large-volume investors were likely completing transactions and moving BTC to cold storage.
“Looks like @michael_saylor is bringing http://hope.com to the corporate community. Impacts are being seen already. Coins once again being scooped off exchanges,” statistician Willy Woo added in a series of tweets on Friday.
“$355m scooped off Gemini, a favourite exchange for regulated entities.”
Woo cited on-chain analytics resource CryptoQuant, which in what it described as “unusual exchange outflows” confirmed aggregated exchange withdrawals totalled 11,754 BTC ($442 million) in a single hour alone on the day.
Exchange balances in general continue to plumb new lows, CryptoQuant data shows.
Full steam ahead to $100,000
With anticipation building, quant analyst PlanB, creator of the stock-to-flow Bitcoin price forecasting models, has been quick to point out that BTC/USD is already behaving exactly as required.
Depending on which iteration of stock-to-flow is used, the 2021 bull market should produce either an average $100,000 or $288,000 per bitcoin.
“#Bitcoin price track after 2020 halving is between 2012 and 2016 tracks,” he explained alongside an updated chart.
“I added S2F ($100K) and S2FX ($288K) model targets. Targets are average prices, actual BTC price will oscillate around targets. If 2021 bull market follows 2017 then $100K it is, if we follow 2013 .. $288K.”
The targets enclose what various other cryptocurrency figures have predicted for the coming year. These include RT host Max Keiser, whose prediction of $28,000 by the end of 2020 made him a household name after Bitcoin performed almost exactly as he said, and who now believes that $220,000 later in 2021 is most likely.
