Excitement is creeping back again in the cryptocurrency market as prices start to show early signs of an upcoming rally.
Currently trading around $57,500, late on Wednesday, Bitcoin went to surpass $58,600. $60,000 is now the target that would take us to mid-April levels when we hit an all-time high of $64,850.
Ether hit $3,820 on Thursday. This renewed interest in the second-largest cryptocurrency has ETHBTC trending up from 0.06 to 0.6654 with the next resistance sitting at just above 0.07.
Both Bitcoin and Ether are currently about 11% to 14% away from their respective ATHs.
With the top asset pumping, the total market cap also went past $2.5 trillion, with other notable gainers including DOT (18%), HBAR (11%), LINK (11%), and MINA (10%) in the past 24 hours while in the past week, STACKS (58%), OHM (57%), ONE (34%), and FTM (31%) hogged the limelight.
For the last two days, the US dollar index is also trending down, currently at 93.960, after hitting one year-high at 94.5 on Tuesday.
This time the prices are pumping in anticipation of a Bitcoin ETF approval propelled by SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s support for CME futures-based exchange-traded funds.
Market mainly trading a BTC futures ETF approval pic.twitter.com/MT1rgnqXFZ
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) October 14, 2021
Open interest on Bitcoin futures is also spiking significantly, reaching $20.77 billion, a level that was last seen on May 10th and April 20th, according to Bybt.
With CME’s futures the basis of these ETFs, it makes sense that OI on the regulated platform has already hit a new all-time high at $3.23 billion.
The price action has started to have an effect on funding rates as well which were negative just last month, while currently, the highest is on OKEx at 0.0479%.
“BTC quarterly annualized rolling basis now at 15%. This basis hit 51% around the April 2021 top and 26% at the 2019 top. There’s room,” said trader and economist Alex Kruger.
5/ In our previous update, we highlighted the CME futures premium over the other exchanges as an unusual occurrence and a sign of institutional interest. This has persisted and was clearly driven by Gensler’s comments. Two reasons driving the CME premium: pic.twitter.com/D8D96KpYA3
— QCP Capital (@QCPCapital) October 14, 2021
Amidst the return of euphoria in the crypto market, Michael Burry of ‘Big Short’ fame who made his fortune by betting against the housing bubble, has crypto in his sight, but the sad thing is he doesn’t really know how to short crypto.
Before asking “how do you short a cryptocurrency,” Burry also commented on the crypto industry experiencing the speculation that “probably tops anything in history.” And the Crypto Twitter (CT), of course, couldn’t help but take a jab at him.
“Imagine knowing this and not taking part in it,” commented popular crypto investor CT Degen Spartan.
“My thesis is that the crypto bubble will be 100x the insanity of the tulip bubble. People will be taking on multigenerational debt to fund their punts, either in the fear that they get left behind in fiat or the greed that they can hyper gamble their bloodline into elite status.”
Dude claimed price was gonna collapse.
Media gave him all the attention
It didn’t so he deleted his tweets.
Now he’s back making the same proclamations but he doesn’t even know how to take out a basic short????
Lmao. pic.twitter.com/XxgQ67p6bk
— :~# i_am_nomad (@IamNomad) October 14, 2021
Last week, Burry had dismissed popular meme coin Dogecoin (DOGE) competitor Shiba Inu (SHIB) as “pointless.” Currently trading at $0.00002878, SHIB is down 24% from its May high of $0.00003791 but is up 51076422.9% in about a year.
The fund manager had compared the excitement around bitcoin and meme stocks to the housing boom and the dot-com bubble and warned that they’ve been “driven by speculative fervor to insane heights from which the fall will be dramatic and painful.”
Known for investing in the traditional memecoin GameStop, Burry inadvertently paved the way for the short squeeze on the stock in January that sent GME’s share prices skyrocketing.