Market Wrap: Bitcoin Sees Best Day in Over a Month

Hi, I’m Jimmy He, here to take you through the day’s crypto market highlights and news.

Bitcoin (BTC) surged above $22,500 early Monday, hitting its highest price in over a month.

The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was trading at $21,696, up 3.1% over the past 24 hours.

Oanda senior market analyst Edward Moya said that crypto sentiment is improving amid signs that the global economy will remain on solid footing for the near future and that the U.S. central bank will raise interest rates at its next meeting by 0.75 of a percentage point, rather than by 1 percentage point as some monetary policy observers had predicted last week.

“If bitcoin continues to stabilize here over the next two weeks, the crypto winter could be over,” Moya said.

GlobalBlock CEO Rufus Round said that he is seeing greater investor commitment to cryptocurrency as markets experience relief.

“We, certainly at GlobalBlock, are seeing professional buyers load up on bitcoin and ether around these levels,” Round said. “It’s such a collapse and there’s been so much stress in the markets. The forced sellers are hopefully all done by now, and people are seeing value right here, especially given the macroeconomic backdrop.”

Most major altcoins outperformed bitcoin, with Polygon’s MATIC token leading the charts, up 18.4% over the past 24 hours. MATIC surged over 66% over seven days after Disney chose the Ethereum scaling tool as part of its 2022 Accelerator Program.

Ether (ETH) climbed 9% to $1,469. Last Friday, Ethereum’s ninth “shadow fork” went live as the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap moved closer to its transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

Today’s edition of Market Wrap was produced by Sage D. Young.

Crypto funds had inflows for a third consecutive week with inflows of $12 million in the seven days through July 15, according to a CoinShares report. But a lot of those investments came from investors betting on further price declines in bitcoin.

Short-bitcoin positions, which bet on a price decline in BTC, generated $15 million in inflows. Short-bitcoin inflows reached a record four-week run of $88 million.

Net outflows for long investment products totaled $2.6 million. Traditional bitcoin investment products saw outflows amounting to $2.6 million, while ether-focused funds had $2.5 million of outflows.

“We believe this highlights new investors expecting further price downside, while those currently invested are not selling out of positions, believing crypto prices are close to a bottom,” the authors wrote.

Altcoin funds saw minor inflows with $500,000 of inflows for Solana, $300,000 for XRP and $100,000 for Tron.

Regionally, the U.S. inflows totaled $21 million, outperforming other countries. Canadian outflows totaled $13 million, pushing the country’s cumulative year-to-date outflows to $388 million.

Sector classifications are provided via the Digital Asset Classification Standard (DACS), developed by CoinDesk Indices to provide a reliable, comprehensive and standardized classification system for digital assets. The CoinDesk 20 is a ranking of the largest digital assets by volume on trusted exchanges.