Bitcoin Fails To Shine On Its Birthday — Ethereum, Dogecoin Follow Lead — But Here's Why The Downtrend May Be Temporary

Bitcoin BTC/USD traded nearly 1.8% lower on the day it celebrated its 13th birthday as the global cryptocurrency market cap rose 0.2% to $2.2 trillion.

What Happened: BTC, which was first mined on Jan. 3 by its pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, has fallen 8.1% for the week.

The second-largest coin by market cap, Ethereum ETH/USD traded 1.6% lower at $3,752.73 over 24 hours. Over a seven-day trailing period, it has fallen 6.9%.

Dogecoin DOGE/USD was down 2.1% over 24 hours at $0.17. Over the past seven days, it has fallen 8%.

DOGE-rival Shiba Inu (SHIB) declined 3.3% to $0.000033 over 24 hours. For the week, it has dropped 13.5%.

The top three gainers over 24 hours were BORA (BORA), yearn.finance (YFI), and Ankr (ANKR), according to CoinMarketCap data.

BORA shot up 18.9% to $1.20, YFI rose 13.65% to $41,112.42, while ANKR was up 9.75% to $0.1135 in the period.

See Also: How To Buy Bitcoin (BTC)

Why It Matters: On Monday, Block Inc SQ CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted an image of the genesis block to mark Bitcoin’s birthday. 

Since 2022 began, BTC has fallen 2.9% as December’s bearishness spilled over into the new year.

“Although 2021 ended on a gloomy note, Bitcoin and Ethereum closed the year up 57% and 403%, far surpassing returns for traditional financial assets,” noted Kaiko Research, in an emailed note.

Through a period of lean volumes during the December holidays, Kaiko Research noted unusual trading activity on Coinbase Global Inc’s COIN trading platform. 

Sharing a chart of a second-by-second buy vs. sell volume of transactions above 5 BTC, the research firm said a cluster of buy and sell orders were executed immediately before options expiry on Friday. While on Jan. 1 a large uptick was seen in sell orders.

“It seems likely that a whale executed a large buy order on Coinbase causing a spike in market share, and in the days that followed whales were mostly sellers,” wrote Kaiko Research.

The downbeat sentiment in the cryptocurrency market was reflected in Alternative’s “Crypto Fear & Greed Index” which pointed towards “Extreme Fear” at press time.

However, the downtrend is short-term as BTC has broken out of the down-trending line dating back to the all-time high and has retested support at that line, according to a note by GlobalBlock analyst Marcus Sotiriou.

“This suggests a move back to the local range highs at $51,000-52,000 could be on the cards soon,” as per Sotiriou.

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