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Bitcoin (BTC) has “well-formed” evidence, which suggests that its next all-time high will top out at $200,000, one analyst says.

In a tweet on Jan. 27, popular Twitter commentator Trader Tardigrade, also known as Alan, also revealed $70,000 as the next potential bear market bottom.

Stochastic indicator offers Bitcoin bulls historical firepower

For many, BTC price action is still bound by Bitcoin’s four-year halving cycles. The resulting price pattern offers one “all time high year” in every four, with 2025 next in line.

Bitcoin’s block subsidy halving will occur a year prior, and from then on, Alan argues, the path will be open to a giant $200,000.

That price tag came about from an analysis of Bitcoin’s stochastic oscillator, which syncs with cycle highs and lows in BTC/USD. Currently, the indicator is printing its latest trough, and if history is a guide, price behavior will do likewise.

Litecoin (LTC) has rebounded by 130% to almost $100 after bottoming out near $40.50 in June 2022. The primary reasons include broadly improving risk-on sentiment and euphoria around Litecoin’s upcoming halving in August 2023.

However, technicals suggest that LTC may wipe out most of these gains in the coming months.

LTC price paints giant bear flag 

Litecoin stands to pare its gains mainly due to a giant bear flag on the weekly chart.

A “bear flag” is a bearish continuation pattern that occurs when the price consolidates inside an ascending, parallel channel after undergoing a strong downtrend. It resolves after the price breaks below its lower trendline with a rise in trading volumes.

Litecoin has been painting a similar pattern since early June 2022. Previously, the LTC/USD pair had undergone a 70% price correction from $130 to $40.50. Thus, from the technical perspective, it would resume its downtrend course if its price breaks below the lower trendline.

Market analysts rely on many technical indicators to anticipate future trends, one of which is the very-popular ascending triangle chart pattern.

What is an ascending triangle pattern?

As the name indicates, an ascending triangle on a chart forms when the price consolidates between a rising trendline support and a horizontal trendline resistance.

The pattern typically appears during persistent uptrends or downtrends. Most technical analysts see it as a “continuation pattern,” meaning the general market trend is likely to resume.

For example, the Bitcoin (BTC) price chart above shows the BTC/USD trading pair forming an ascending triangle pattern between April 2020 and July 2020.

The BTC price breaks out of the triangle range in late July to the upside. It returns to retest the pattern’s resistance trendline as support in September for further bullish confirmation, resuming its uptrend.

Bitcoin (BTC) price had a mixed reaction on Jan. 25 after the United States reported a 2.9% gross domestic product growth in the fourth quarter, slightly better than expected. Still, the sum of all goods and services commercialized between October and December grew less than 3.2% from the previous quarter.

Albeit somewhat optimistic, another data set limiting investors' confidence was news that the U.S. Federal Reserve (FED) would revert its contractive measures anytime soon as U.S. durable goods orders jumped 5.6% in December. The indicator came in much higher than anticipated, so it could potentially mean that interest rates could be increased for a little longer than expected.

Oil prices are also still a focus for investors, with crude WTI approaching its highest level since mid-September, currently trading at $81.50. The underlying reason is the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict after the U.S. and Germany decided on Dec. 25 to send battle tanks to Ukraine.

The United States dollar index (DXY), a measure of the dollar's strength against a basket of top foreign currencies, sustained 102, near its lowest levels in eight months. This signals low confidence in the U.S. Federal Reserve's ability to curb inflation without causing a significant recession.

Regulatory uncertainty could also have been vital in limiting Bitcoin's upside. De Nederlandsche Bank, the Dutch central Bank, fined cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase $3.6 million due to non-compliance with local regulations for financial service providers — the news was released on Jan. 26.

For much of 2022, the crypto market focused on the United States Federal Reserve’s actions. The central bank created a bearish environment for risk-on assets like stocks and cryptocurrencies by increasing the interest rates on borrowing. 

Toward the end of 2022, positive economic data, healthy employment numbers and a decreasing inflation rate provided hope that a much-awaited slowdown in the rate of interest rate hikes would occur. Currently, the market expects that rate hikes will reduce from 50 basis points (bps) to 25 bps before the complete end of the hiking regime by mid-2023.

From the perspective of the Fed’s goal of constraining liquidity and providing headwinds to an overheated economy and stock market, things are starting to improve. It appears that the Fed’s plan of a soft-landing by quantitative tightening to curb inflation without throwing the economy into a deep recession might be working. The recent rally in stock markets and Bitcoin can be attributed to the market's trust in the above narrative.

However, another essential American agency, the U.S. Treasury, poses significant risks to the global economy. While the Fed has been draining liquidity from the markets, the Treasury provided a countermeasure by draining its cash balance and negating some of the Fed's efforts. This situation may be coming to an end.

It invokes risks of constrained liquidity conditions with the possibility of an adverse economic shock. For this reason, analysts warn that the second half of 2023 may see excess volatility.

Stablecoins in the cryptocurrency market help provide U.S. dollar-pegged tokens within the volatile industry. In bull markets, the market capitalization of stablecoins tends to decrease as investors flock to more volatile assets; and in bear markets, investors seek shelter in low-volatility stablecoins, thus increasing their market caps.

On Jan. 26, the total market capitalization for stablecoins like Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), Binance USD (BUSD) and Dai (DAI) is over $131 billion.

Stablecoins are so crucial to the future of crypto that Moody’s, a well-respected analytics agency, is planning to develop a scoring system, which may help reduce the speculation and fear that some investors have with stablecoins.

Such fear amid a lack of stablecoin transparency has led one of the top stablecoins, BUSD, to see a major usage decline in recent weeks.

Let’s examine the factors affecting the BUSD stablecoin.

Bitcoin (BTC) could get sucked toward $50,000 like a magnet if it continues to follow gold, fresh analysis predicts.

In a Twitter update on Jan. 26, popular trader and market commentator TechDev presented a lofty new BTC price target tied to XAU/USD.

Gold, Bitcoin inverse dollar correlation “without question”

As the debate over how much Bitcoin will compete with gold remains, bullish-price takes are surfacing.

For TechDev, the outlook is more optimistic than for many — Bitcoin might even crack the $50,000 mark.

“What if Bitcoin continues to follow Gold / DXY ?” he queried.

Bitcoin (BTC) is seeing new records in network activity as volatility sends BTC price action to fresh five-month highs.

Data from resources including MiningPoolStats confirms that Bitcoin’s hash rate hit new all-time highs on Jan. 26.

Hash rate passes 300 EH/s threshold

In another example of Bitcoin’s blitz recovery from the pits of post-FTX woes, network hashing power is now bigger than ever.

Hash rate, which is an expression of the processing power dedicated to the network by miners, is currently at 321 exahashes-per-second (EH/s), according to MiningPoolStats raw data.

Despite being only an estimate and impossible to measure entirely accurately, the latest readings are quite the feat, having never crossed the 300 EH/s level before.

Bitcoin investors' sentiment improved after signals pointing to lower inflationary pressure suggested that the U.S. Federal Reserve could soon move away from its interest rate increase and quantitative tightening. Commonly known as a pivot, the trend change would benefit risk assets such as cryptocurrencies.

On Jan. 22, the China-based peer-to-peer trades of USD Coin (USDC) reached a 3.5% premium versus the United States dollar, indicating moderate FOMO by retail traders. This level is the highest in more than 6 months, suggesting excessive cryptocurrency buying demand has pressured the indicator above fair value.

The all-time high on the 7-day Bitcoin hash rate — an estimate of processing power dedicated to mining — also supported the bullish momentum. The indicator peaked at 276.9 exo-hash per second (EH/s) on Jan. 19, signaling a reversion of the recent weakness caused by miners facing financial difficulties.

Despite the bears' best efforts, Bitcoin has been trading above $20,000 since Jan. 14 — a movement that explains why the $1.48 billion Bitcoin monthly options expiry will vastly benefit bulls despite the recent failure to break the $23,200 resistance.

Bulls were too optimistic, but remain well positioned

Bitcoin's latest rally on Jan. 20 caught bears by surprise, as a mere 6% of the put (sell) options for the monthly expiry have been placed above $22,000. Thus, bulls are better positioned even though they set nearly 40% of their call (buy) options at $23,000 or higher.

Bitcoin (BTC) saw weakness at the Jan. 25 Wall Street open as United States equities fell in step. 

BTC price faces stiff resistance

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD heading below $22,500 after failing to crack resistance near five-month highs.

U.S. stocks saw a weak start to the session, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite Index down 1.1% and 1.6%, respectively at the time of writing.

Bitcoin bulls had themselves faced trouble attempting to push into an area of liquidity above $23,400, this so far remaining unchallenged and home to a significant number of would-be short liquidations.

Traders remained on the fence, hoping that a clearer trading signal would come after several days of essentially sideways price action.

Bitcoin (BTC) still risks “considerable danger” in 2023 as macroeconomic conditions dictate price action.

That is according to economist Lyn Alden, who, in private comments to Cointelegraph, cautioned on Bitcoin staying bullish after its January gains.

Alden: BTC price bottom is a “process”

Optimism is increasing throughout crypto as BTC/USD broadly retains levels, which are 40% higher than at the start of the year.

What the rest of 2023 may hold, however, is still a topic of debate, and Alden suggests that it is naive to assume that the good times will continue unchecked.

The reason, she says, lies with the United States lawmakers and the Federal Reserve.

The price of Ether (ETH) rallied 16% between Jan. 14 and Jan. 21, peaking at $1,680 before facing a 5.4% rejection. Curiously, the same resistance level resulted in a substantial correction in late August 2022 and again in early November 2022. 

From one side, traders are relieved that Ether is trading up 35.5% year-to-date, but the repeated corrections that follow retests of the $1,680 resistance may have weakened investors' sentiment.

Negative newsflow might have limited Ether investors' appetite after troubled cryptocurrency company Digital Currency Group (DCG) faced more legal issues this week. On Jan. 23, a group of Genesis Capital creditors filed a lawsuit alleging violations of federal securities laws. In addition, the plaintiffs allege the lending firm made false and misleading statements through a scheme to defraud potential and existing digital asset lenders.

Another new concerns for Ether holders came on Jan. 22 after, a "temperature check" proposal to deploy the Uniswap v3 protocol to BNB Chain received overwhelming support from the Uniswap community. 80% of Uniswap's UNI governance token holders have voted to deploy the additional version of the decentralized exchange protocol.

On the bright side, Ethereum developers have created a testing environment for the upcoming Shanghai network upgrade. According to Ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden, the testnet appears to have been created to evaluate staking withdrawals, which are currently disabled on the mainnet. Over 14.5 million ETH (worth $23 billion) has been deposited into the Ethereum staking contract, and harsh criticism followed the multiple delays in enabling withdrawals.

Solana’s (SOL) recent 250% rally to $25 has shocked many investors in the crypto market. At the same time, traders who had eyes on the negative funding rate for SOL in the futures market could have anticipated the bullish move ahead of others.

It’s because excessive negative funding rates, like the one in Solana displayed below, implies that the majority of traders are on the short side, providing an opportunity for buyers to run their stops.

Regardless of the reason behind the price increase, if enough buyers are interested in joining the bullish move, it can turn into a medium-to-long-term bullish trend. However, Solana's fundamental and market analysis shows weakness, which will more likely cause a steep correction in the altcoin.

Solana finds a worthy competitor in NFT space

Solana ranks second in terms of NFT trading across blockchain platforms. Ethereum commands the lion's share of the total NFT trading volume with an 81.6% share. Solana has the second biggest pie with an 11.6% share, according to data from Delphi Digital.

However, the ecosystem received a setback when two of the largest projects in DeGods and y00ts decided to shift away from Solana. The departure of top-performing projects sets a bad precedent for product developers looking to launch NFTs. To date, Ethereum remains the go-to choice for big brands and community projects.

The metaverse hype that began in 2021 dissolved almost entirely by the end of 2022 as the top projects in the space, Decentraland and The Sandbox, lost 95% of their market capitalization. The most prominent reason for the fall was a lack of user growth. 

Still, the metaverse narrative is far from dead and will grow in the future. Reportedly, Apple will launch its virtual reality gear sometime in spring 2023. The announcement was a positive catalyst for Decentraland’s MANA and The Sandbox’s SAND, causing a double-digit price surge.

While there’s evidence of positive buying volume supporting the pump, the weak fundamentals of metaverse platforms and overheated market indicators suggest that the price pump risks reversing quickly.

The Apple pump-and-dump

Facebook’s (Meta) foray into the metaverse was one of the most prominent catalysts for metaverse tokens. The idea for Decentraland’s and The Sandbox’s growth is that a decentralized metaverse would flourish more than Meta’s centralized version.

However, the technology has yet to become popular among the masses. In 2022, the percentage of VR users among Steam gamers was less than 2%, and the usage has yet to grow over the past two years. This is discouraging for the technology’s adoption because the gaming sector was the first to embrace it.

Bitcoin (BTC) traded sideways at the Jan. 24 Wall Street open with analysts at a loss over where price would go next.

BTC price holds below key resistance

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView tracked a day of consolidation for BTC/USD, which continued to linger near $23,000.

The pair saw little reaction to the start of trading, including technical problems at the New York Stock Exchange, while United States macroeconomic data also failed to change the status quo.

Bitcoin thus lacked direction after establishing a narrower trading range on Jan. 20.

“Bitcoin couldn't break through a crucial resistance at $23.1K,” Cointelegraph contributor Michaël van de Poppe summarized.

Ether's (ETH) rally versus Bitcoin (BTC) is not only showing signs of exhaustion, but is also in danger of breaking below a key technical support level. 

ETH slides vs. BTC in second half of January

The ETH/BTC pair declined nearly 9.25% on Jan. 24 from its local top of 0.0779 BTC established on Jan. 11. Since the start of the year, Bitcoin is slightly outpacing Ether in USD terms, rising 38% versus 35%, respectively.

Interestingly, Ether's pullback versus Bitcoin has landed its price at the bottom of its EMA ribbon range, as shown below.

The EMA ribbon indicator shows numerous exponential moving averages of increasing timeframe on the same price chart. Dropping below the ribbon range increases an asset's likelihood of seeing an extended down-move.

So in other words, breaking lower would increase its possibility of declining by more than 20% from its current price levels.