The team at digital assets firm Kraken asks whether the current Bitcoin (BTC) rally could go straight up “forever.”
Kraken points out in a recent report that for the first time since October 2020, we have seen a “brief pause” in the form of this recent BTC price correction.
The Kraken team notes in its report that the latest correction seems to have hit BTC the hardest as alternative cryptocurrencies (or altcoins) appear to be “decoupling” from the leading digital currency.
Kraken’s report confirms that Ethereum (ETH) is now beginning to flex its muscle by surpassing the $2,700 mark (now trading above $3,500) and the ETHBTC pairing “broke out from a multi-year consolidation.”
Kraken also mentioned they’ve reviewed the monthly performance of Polkadot (DOT), Cardano (ADA), and Uniswap (UNI). The report further noted that ADA and DOT are “maintaining their strength and attracting more interest in staking.” Kraken will “begin allowing clients to participate in Cardano staking,” the report added.
It also noted:
“Inflation is once again a topic of concern in traditional markets. As stocks continue to rally to new highs, people are wondering how this will be reflected in bitcoin’s price. Our team examines where inflation is hiding in the economy and what the continued money printing by central banks means for the crypto markets.”
The report continued:
“NFTs continue to captivate the attention of investors and content creators worldwide. Companies such as McDonald’s, the New York Stock Exchange and Spotify, alongside celebrities like Steve Aoki, Tom Brady and Ashton Kutcher have become the latest to foray into the growing asset class.”
Some of the main takeaways from Kraken’s report are:
- Risk-On Risk: Bitcoin’s dominance “fell to a near three-year low of 49% in late April amid an increasingly greater demand for altcoins.” The three-month long rotation into altcoins “tells us that market participants having developed an increasingly greater taste for riskier cryptoassets and are coming to terms with the ‘Law of Large Numbers.'” The most notable outperformers in April “were centralized exchange coins and decentralized exchange coins with a return of +60% and +53%, respectively.”
- Bitcoin’s Adoptive Strength: Bitcoin’s corrections have “been more shallow this bull run compared to historical rallies.” This “may be reflective of increased liquidity and lower volatility.”
- Two in a Row: For a second month, “ETH (+45%) outperformed BTC (-2%) and hit a new all-time high ($2,776).” ETH’s outperformance “comes off the back of increasingly greater interest from institutions and excitement surrounding upcoming technology rollouts.” ETH “ended up closing just below a key resistance level, which tells us a price target of $5,000 may be on the horizon.”
- DeFi’s Future: Decentralized finance “continues to attract the attention of both market participants and venture capital investors alike.” ConsenSys, Cosmos, Polkadot and NeptuneDAO are “just some of the projects that saw greater investment into improving their infrastructure. Last month, aggregate total value locked (TVL) on Ethereum DeFi projects rose +38% to an all-time high of $66B.”
You can check out the full report here.