Bitcoin and Ethereum: Modest price rises

Yesterday, the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum both modestly increased. ETH is currently up 0.3% from a week ago and up 1.8% from yesterday, while BTC is currently up 2.3% from yesterday and 1.2% from that same point in time. To put it another way, the minor losses from the previous several days have been made up.

Bitcoin vs. Ethereum pricing comparison

The cost of Bitcoin momentarily reached $30,000 last night.

It has been bouncing about this crucial level for more than a month and a half.

Since the yearly peaks on July 13, when it was close to $32,000, the price has essentially done nothing but decline; on July 24, it had even dipped below $29,000.

It has been fluctuating slightly below $30,000 up until yesterday, with a few brief dips below $29,000 as well, but yesterday it appears to have snapped this downward lateralization trend.

Although it cannot be completely ruled out, it is not certain that an uptrend has been initiated.

The volatility of the Bitcoin price is actually at a low point right now, and in situations like this, it frequently explodes with big changes sooner or later.

Additionally, historically, August has typically seen a little increase in volatility while July has typically been a month of moderate volatility. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that, with a few rare and brief exceptions, it has really varied nearly exclusively within a fairly limited band of $29,000 to $30,000 in July.

At this point, it would not even be unexpected if volatility rose in August, causing it to depart from the range formed in July.

The oddity from yesterday

Despite being modest, yesterday’s movement appeared unusual.

In reality, other risky investments underperformed yesterday after a relatively bullish start to the summer, including US equities, and gold’s price underperformed as well.

The US dollar was the only asset with any connection to Bitcoin that increased yesterday, which is essentially an outlier.

The price of Bitcoin frequently decreases along with the rise in the dollar, equities decline, and gold price decline. Instead, although not experiencing a particularly strong period, the price of BTC marginally increased yesterday, in part because of the information that those at BlackRock are highly optimistic about having their request for a spot Bitcoin ETF approved.

Putting all of these factors together, it does not seem altogether unlikely that such a thing has occurred. However, one minor oddity of that size alone is insufficient to conclude that the pattern has shifted.

Amount paid for Ethereum

Although Bitcoin itself was the driving force behind yesterday’s recovery, the price of ETH has followed a similar pattern.

ETH had topped $2,000 on July 14 before beginning a downward trend that culminated on August 7 at slightly over $1,800.

It first rose to $1,850 yesterday, and then it reached a day high just shy of $1,880.

As can be observed, while having even lower volatility, Ethereum’s price trend does not quite mirror that of Bitcoin.

This is true even though the new stablecoin PayPal developed (PYUSD) is based on Ethereum and might, in theory, encourage users to use ETH more frequently in the future.

Therefore, it appears that Bitcoin is currently driving the market while Ethereum is simply following along.

BTC to ETH ratio

By comparing Bitcoin’s market capitalization to Ethereum’s, it can be shown that, up until July 30, it had fallen, from 2.64 to 2.51, before rising once more in August.

In actuality, it is currently somewhat below 2.6 times, which is not drastically lower than its level at the end of June.

The 2023 top of this indicator was attained in late June at 2.66, but by the beginning of June it had dropped to 2.3.

As a result, Bitcoin appears to be quite powerful in the cryptocurrency markets right now, much more so than Ethereum.

Even so, its current domination (close to 49%) is still less than the highest recorded this year, which was 50.5%.