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Bitcoin rises near $70,000 amid ETF surge

Bitcoin surge

Bitcoin rose close to $70,000 on Monday. This was partly due to a surge of inflows into exchange-traded funds for the largest digital asset. Optimism about the outlook for US regulations also supported sentiment.

https://twitter.com/Cointelegraph/status/1848356574697500924

The cryptocurrency rose 1% before paring some of the gains to trade at $68,252 as of 8:32 a.m. in New York. Smaller tokens such as second-ranked Ether and top-10 coin Solana moved in narrow ranges. US spot-Bitcoin ETFs attracted almost $2.4 billion of net inflows in the six days through Oct.

18, data show. This was partly based on bets that US crypto rules will become friendlier after the Nov. 5 presidential election.

Republican candidate Donald Trump is openly pro-crypto, making Bitcoin a so-called Trump trade. Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris has pledged to support a regulatory framework for the industry. This contrasts with a crackdown on the sector under the Biden administration.

“The two key market trends are the elections and the global macroeconomic environment,” said David Lawant, head of research at crypto prime broker FalconX. The Bitcoin options market shows that “forward implied volatility is heavily clustered around election day and somewhat subdued leading to it and some time after it,” he wrote in a note. Bitcoin climbed nearly 10% in the seven days through Sunday.

This marked its best weekly performance in more than a month.

Bitcoin’s ETF surge and price movements

ETF demand helped the token reach a record high of $73,798 in March.

The rally cooled, and Bitcoin last traded above $70,000 back in June. However, following a failed challenge of the $70,000 level during early Monday trading hours in Asia, bitcoin fell below $67,000 in U.S. morning action. Bitcoin’s price was lower by 2.3% over the past 24 hours, underperforming the broad-market’s 1% loss during the same period.

Ethereum’s ether was also down nearly 1%, while litecoin, polkadot, and the Internet Computer Protocol’s token led losses with 4%-5% declines. A notable outperformer was Solana with a 2.4% gain to $163, though still down from its $170 weekend high. Bitcoin mining stocks also suffered, but one outlier was TeraWulf (WULF), which recently pivoted to high-performance computing to power artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, rising by 12% on Monday.

The recent price movement likely contributed to today’s action. Bitcoin had risen almost continuously since dipping to just under $60,000 eleven days ago, so a modest reversal was expected at some point. There has also been a sharp rise in interest rates across Western economies on Monday, including 10 basis point gains in both the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield and the German 10-year Bund yield.

Higher rates can often pressure prices of risk assets, including bitcoin. Looking further out, bitcoin currently remains in the same flat-to-down price channel it has been in since hitting a record high of $73,700 more than seven months ago. The most recent challenge of the $70,000 level in late July also failed, with bitcoin sinking to under $52,000 days later.

“Wouldn’t be unreasonable to get another HL [higher low] potentially with a sweep of $66K, probably where the next opportunity is,” noted a well-followed analyst. Upcoming quarterly earnings reports this week for U.S. public companies may weigh on investors’ risk appetite in the stock market, and consequently on cryptocurrencies due to the strong correlation between the asset classes, crypto trading firm Wincent noted. “It’s a risk-off week given the recent performance of BTC and the earnings week in the U.S. adding to a risk-off mentality,” a Wincent spokesperson said in a Telegram message.

“We can expect a brief pullback this week and then watch out for a potential rally and all-time highs as we push into the U.S. elections.”

Sofia Hernandez

Sofia Hernandez has written for several media outlets, and she now oversees NewsReports as its editor.
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