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Bitcoin bulls were able to defeat bitcoin bears this week after a titanic power struggle at the start of January, with the price rocketing beyond $18,000 on December 12 for the first time since mid-December.
The world’s most actively traded cryptocurrency at the time of publication was valued at $18,687, up 7% in the previous day. Price spiked up to $18,780 earlier in the day, making it the asset’s sixth straight day with a bullish candle.
The cryptocurrency market was up for the majority of the day, with Ethereum rising about 6% to reach a two-month high of $1,400. On the other hand, Cardano, Solana, and XRP all added roughly 5% while trading basically sideways.
With a gain of 21.11% over the previous day, Avalanche was the highest gainer among the top 20 coins by market capitalization. The network and Amazon Web Services (AWS) joined up on Wednesday to grow blockchain services for organizations and governments. The total value of the cryptocurrency market increased by 4.78% to $900 billion, which is the biggest increase in a single day this year.
A return of significant social dominance spikes has been credited with driving Bitcoin’s spectacular rise over the last seven days, as the asset’s decline has resulted in drastically reduced pricing. Poor market liquidity towards the end of 2022 kept whales at bay, but on-chain data reveals that between January 5 and January 11, whales with 1,000 to 10,000 BTC added over 20,000 BTC to their holdings.
Over 13% of the circulating supply had returned to profitability as of today, according to Glassnode, marking a major milestone since mid-2022.
“As Bitcoin rallies to $18.2k, over 13% of the Circulating Supply has returned to profit. The observed sharp move upwards in this metric helps to confirm that a large volume of BTC was acquired between $16.5k and $18.2k,” wrote Glassnode sharing the chart below.
However, many have suggested that Ethereum’s resurgence is related to the upcoming Shanghai upgrade. Users will be able to unstake and withdraw their Ether that has been locked within the Beacon chain since December 2020 thanks to the update, which is scheduled to launch in March. Additionally, the upgrade is anticipated to lessen Ethereum’s centralization, allowing for the onboarding of more projects and, as a result, the flow of liquidity into the ecosystem.
Having said that, it appears that the markets are already pricing that. Since February 2021, 3,000 new shark addresses (each holding 100 to 10,000 $ETH) have appeared on the network, increasing the total to 48,556.
Tether, the top stablecoin by market size, has been accumulated by shark and whale addresses holding various cryptocurrencies as they get ready for the next bull run, according to onchain statistics. According to Santiment,
“There are now 21,459 addresses that hold $100k or more USDT, just 1% from a new all-time high.”
