Decentral Block Post

The market witnessed a major banking crisis in March as Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed and Silvergate Bank entered liquidation as the result of dire financial distress. In Europe, the government brokered a forced takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS. Still, the United States equities markets and the European stock markets closed the month on a positive note.

The cryptocurrency market was also shaken by volatility, but Bitcoin (BTC) gained about 23% in March. Going forward, the picture looks encouraging for Bitcoin bulls in April and data from Coinglass suggests that the month has largely favored the buyers.

Although altcoins reacted positively to Bitcoin’s rise, the rally has not been equal across the board. This suggests that market participants have been selective in their purchases. As a result, traders might focus on the movers rather than the laggards.

Let’s study the charts of five cryptocurrencies that look positive in the near term. If they break above their resistance levels, they may offer short-term trading opportunities.

Bitcoin price analysis

Bitcoin is facing stiff resistance at the $29,000 level but the bulls have not allowed the price to lose ground. This suggests that the bulls are being patient as they anticipate a move higher.

Data from the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) index showed an uptick of 0.3% in February, which lower than the 0.5% increase seen in January. Economists had projected a rise of 0.4% and the PCE data suggests that inflation is gradually showing a decreasing trend. 

Risky assets rallied in response to the data and some analysts expect the Federal Reserve to start cutting rates by the end of the year, The FedWatch Tool shows a 33% probability of a 50 basis point cut by December 2023.

The cryptocurrency space is trying to come out of a long bear phase. This has improved sentiment and analysts are focusing on the long-term prospects of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.

Citi said in its “Money, Tokens and Games” March report that the blockchain-based tokenization of real-world assets could soar to between $4 to $5 trillion by 2030. Although the lack of legal and regulatory framework, and the skepticism of industry players may pose a challenge in the short term, the investment bank believes they will be overcome eventually.

Could Bitcoin (BTC) and select altcoins extend their up-move or is it time for the rally to stall? Let’s study the charts of the top-10 cryptocurrencies to find out.

Bitcoin’s dominance over the crypto market, which represents its share of market capitalization relative to the total cryptocurrency market capitalization, rose steeply from around 44% to highs of 48% in March. 

While Bitcoin’s price increased by 22.7% during the month, most altcoins yielded subpar or negative returns. However, there were some outliers which showed a second month of positive momentum. Take for example, XRP, which saw steady positive momentum as investors expect a positive outcome in its U.S. court case against the SEC.

Conflux Network

Conflux Network continued its positive run from February, nearly doubling its price in March. The project’s team continued to strengthen its partnerships in China by adding XCMD, the world’s third-largest construction machinery manufacturer and Zen Spark Technology.

The Conflux team also supports the development of permissionless applications. It has established a grants program to promote its ecosystem development.

The CFX token tested the support between $0.10 and $0.20 and continued its positive run to reach a new yearly high of $0.46. The market structure of the token with higher highs and higher lows looks bullish, with a potential target of $0.80. It represents the breakdown level from the 2021 bull run.

The price of Solana (SOL) fell nearly 95% in 2022, partly due to its association with tainted crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried and his collapsed ventures FTX and Alameda Research. But so far in 2023, things have improved for the SOL price.

Solana price doubles in Q1/2023

Solana's price has risen 104% to around $20.60 per SOL in the first quarter of 2023, the highest gains compared to any cryptocurrency in the top-25, including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).

In fact, January was Solana's best month since August 2021 in terms of price performance.

SOL price rallied by about 140% in it, without any major fundamentals that could have driven the rates up. Nonetheless, the SOL/USD pair became excessively oversold in December 2022, which may have influenced traders to buy the dip. 

The rally also coincided with Messari's analysis of the Solana ecosystem after the FTX collapse, showing its staking and decentralization was stable and actually improved its position after the FTX fiasco.

The price of Stellar (XLM) rebounded 15% versus its arch-rival XRP (XRP) two days after the XLM/XRP pair set a record low of 0.181.

Notably, the XLM/XRP pair rose to its intraday high of 0.20 XRP on March 31, a move that coincided with a decoupling between Stellar and XRP in the U.S. dollar market. For instance, XLM's price has jumped over 11% since March 29 versus XRP's 3% decline.

XLM price eyes 10% gains versus XRP in April

On a broader timeframe, XLM has dropped 89% versus its peak of 1.655 XRP in January 2021. Interestingly, the peak formed a month after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple for allegedly selling securities in the form of XRP tokens. 

The SEC vs. Ripple case is now nearing its conclusion with legal experts favoring a win for Ripple.

Meanwhile, XLM continues its long-term downtrend against XRP, though a rebound in April is on the cards.

The Ethereum Foundation has announced April 12 as the date of deployment of the much-anticipated Shanghai and Capella upgrade, together dubbed as Shapella.

The upgrades will enable withdrawals from Ethereum 2.0 staking contracts. The staking contract was first launched in December 2020. It only accepted one-way deposits of ETH, which will change after the upgrade.

To date, users have deposited over 18 million ETH, worth around $32.5 billion, into the Ethereum staking contract at varying times since December 2020.

Analysts vary on the estimates of ETH sell pressure

Most users opted for liquid staking derivatives on decentralized or centralized exchanges. Because these stakers are already liquid, there will likely be no new reason to sell after the Shapella upgrade.

Decentralized LSD platforms like Lido currently account for around 33.2% of the total ETH deposits on the beacon chain. Out of the rest, around 27.1% is deposited via centralized exchanges like Coinbase, Binance and Kraken. Thus, 60.3% of the staked ETH is deposited via liquid staking mediums.

In Cointelegraph Markets Pro’s latest VORTECS™ Report, the institutional-grade crypto trading platform displayed how its members could have captured a cumulative 390% gain by following seven trades based on four different advanced data indicators. The report depicts trading alerts generated between March 11 – 18, 2023. 

The potential gains available to Cointelegraph Markets Pro subscribers significantly outperform a simple buy-and-hold strategy during the same period, which would’ve yielded holders of Bitcoin (BTC) a 33% gain.

Cointelegraph Markets Pro uses indicators such as the VORTECS™ Score, NewsQuakes™, Most Active On-Chain and Top 5 Exchange Outflows to provide alerts for subscribers in real time.

The past three reports have included alerts with cumulative returns over 100%, showing that this advanced crypto intelligence platform churns out winning trade opportunities each week.

VORTECS™ Alerts

SingularityNET (AGIX) — 100% gain

On March 12, AGIX was trading at $0.30 when a score of 77 noted bullish historical patterns for the token. Three days later the price jumped to $0.60, an impressive 100% rise! Scores above 80 also flashed on March 14, when it was trading at $0.40. Traders who bought at this price point could have seen a 50% increase.

Seychelles-based crypto exchange OKX has signaled its intention to expand its crypto services to Australia, a country it believes is primed to take on the next wave of crypto adoption.

The trading platform explained in a March 29 statement that Australia would be a key growth market for the firm moving forward. The firm states it provides services to over 100 countries. In July 2022, it secured a provisional license in Dubai.

"We see Australia as an indispensable part of this strategy and a key growth market. With such a strong uptake of crypto in Australia already, we're committed to the local market and aim to build a strong local office,” the firm wrote in a statement.

Haider Rafique, the chief marketing officer of OKX told Cointelegraph that the decision to expand "Down Under" was driven by a “huge appetite” of Australians for more crypto investment and trading products:

“What I’ve interestingly found over the last 5-6 years is that Australian retail investors certainly show a huge appetite for exploring crypto as an investment vehicle and also for trading. When I came to OKX, I certainly saw that in terms of web traffic and people from Australia trying to explore OKX services.”

The Arbitrum token airdrop led to a massive dump of ARB tokens and projects in the Arbitrum ecosystem in a “sell-the-news” type of event. However, the Ethereum Layer-2 activity remains strong, with the selling pressure of ARB tokens likely done with, making the rollup well-positioned for further growth.

Arbitrum ecosystem tokens sees sell-the-news type event

The Arbitrum (ARB) airdrop was announced on March 16, which caused a significant uptrend in native token prices of Arbitrum ecosystem projects like GMX), Magic , Gains Network (GNS) and Radiant Network (RDNT).

The primary reason behind the pump was the ARB airdrop catalyzing the Arbitrum ecosystem’s growth. However, according to a report from An Ape’s Prologue, “this thesis was seemingly front-run,” as the price surge mainly occurred between the period of the airdrop announcement and the actual airdrop on March 23.

The report added, “On the day the airdrop happened which marked the launch of the $ARB token, the prices of ecosystem tokens began to decline, suggesting a classic “sell the news” event.”

Moreover, the Arbitrum airdrop included a 1.1% allocation out of the total ARB's supply of 12.75 billion for the DAOs in the ecosystem. This was also a reason behind the bullish thesis around the Arbitrum ecosystem, as the DAOs will get a chance to promote usage through ARB incentives.

For the past twelve days, the price of Ether (ETH) has been trading in a narrow descending range. Surprisingly, not even the news of Binance and Changpeng "CZ" Zhao being sued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) was enough to break the support level. 

The lawsuit, filed on March 27, claimed that Binance provided derivatives trading services to U.S.-based customers without first obtaining a derivatives license. Additionally, the US Securities and Exchange Commission served Coinbase with a Wells notice on March 22.

Even if traders saw no reason to reduce their Ether positions due to increased regulatory risk, Binance holds 35% of the open interest in Ether futures. Therefore, if traders are suddenly compelled to liquidate their positions or if there is a sudden reduction in liquidity after U.S. entities are effectively barred from Binance's markets, one should anticipate a significant impact on Ether derivatives markets.

One could point to the market's resiliency after BitMEX derivatives exchange lost its longtime market share advantage following a 30-minute outage in March 2020 during a Bitcoin crash. However, there is no way to predict the outcome of the regulators' case against Binance, so it would be naive to assume that there is a zero percent chance of a service interruption — even if it means clients can close positions and withdraw assets.

Instead of focusing solely on the ETH price, it is essential to closely monitor Ether derivatives to understand how professional traders will react.

Bitcoin (BTC) is up about 71% in Q1 2023, which is the first positive quarter after four consecutive quarters of negative returns in 2023, according to data from Coinglass. This shows that the sentiment has turned positive and the bulls are trying to put a bottom in Bitcoin.

When the undercurrent is bullish, negative news results in shallow corrections. That is what happened after the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission slapped a lawsuit against Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao for trading violations. This news pulled the markets marginally lower but did not start a strong down move.

Another thing that happens in a bullish environment is that cryptocurrencies move up without any specific catalyst. That happened on March 29 when Bitcoin and several major altcoins turned up sharply.

Could Bitcoin and select altcoins start the next leg of the uptrend and where is the rally likely to face resistance? Let’s study the charts of the top-10 cryptocurrencies to find out.

Bitcoin price analysis

In an uptrend, traders typically buy the pullbacks to the 20-day exponential moving average ($26,371). The long tails on the March 27 and 28 candlestick show just that.

XRP (XRP) outperformed its top-ranking crypto rivals over the past 24 hours while reaching the highest price in 10 months. 

XRP price tags 10-month high

On March 29, XRP's price surged by nearly 15% to $0.58, its highest level in ten months, outperforming Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) in the past 24 hours that rose around 4.5% and 2.75%, respectively.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) referred to Bitcoin, Ether, and Litecoin (LTC) as "commodities" in its court filing against Binance. While the U.S. regulatory didn't name XRP, many assumed the token would be categorized as a commodity.

Related: Here’s why CFTC suing Binance is a bigger deal than an SEC enforcement

The lawsuit will likely conclude by the end of March, with legal experts believing Ripple has a chance to win. XRP price has rallied 45% month-to-date on similar hopes, including the March 29 price rally, supplemented further by investors' optimistic interpretation of the CFTC court filing.

The price of Arbitrum (ARB) has dropped by nearly 20% a week after establishing its record high at $1.60 on March 23. However, the Ethereum layer-2 token looks set to resume its uptrend in the coming weeks.

Polygon price fractal

The cues for a bullish Arbitrum token could be traced back to its Ethereum L2 rival Polygon's market debut.

MATIC started trading on Binance on April 26, 2019, at $0.0026 per token. MATIC/USD rallied nearly 300% to reach $0.0105 on the same day before wiping out 70% of those gains in a market correction by May 9, 2019.

It regained its upside momentum afterward, rallying by nearly 1,350% to $0.045 on May 21, 2019.  

The price trajectory reflects a recurring phenomenon involving the launch of digital tokens with seemingly strong fundamental backing, according to independent market analyst Mac.