Bitcoin, Ether, Major Altcoins – Weekly Market Update August 15, 2022
The cryptocurrency market added $8 billion to its market cap during the last seven days and now stands at $1,146 billion. The top 10 coins were mostly in green for the same time period with ether (ETH) and Dogecoin (DOGE) being the biggest gainers with 11.2 and 10 percent gains respectively. Bitcoin (BTC) is currently trading at $24,150 while ether (ETH) is at 1,900.
BTC/USD
Bitcoin was trading near the $23,000 level at the beginning of the new trading week after losing less than a percent during the previous seven-day period. Bulls continued to push upwards and managed to find stability above the 200-day Moving Average (MA) on the weekly timeframe which usually signals a bullish reversal.
On Monday, August 8 the BTC/USDT pair climbed up to $23,800 but not before hitting a daily high of $24,200 during intraday trading. The entire area in the $23,900 – $24,500 range should be considered a resistance.
Bears pushed the price of BTC down to $23,166 on Tuesday fully erasing all gains from the day before. Still, the 21-day EMA provided the needed dynamic support on the daily chart.
The uptrend was resumed on the third day of the workweek. The biggest cryptocurrency moved up to $23,900 increasing by 3.5 percent for the session. It is worth noting that the coin was trading in the wide range between $22,600 – $24,200 throughout the day before finally choosing a direction.
On Thursday, August 11, Bitcoin was flirting with the upper boundary of the mentioned resistance area. The breakout attempt was unsuccessful and it closed at $23,900 and lost all gained territory after hitting $24,900 in the first half of the trading day. There was a potential double top formation on the daily timeframe as well as a bear flag on the weekly.
The Friday session saw the BTC/USDT pair first dropping to $23,620 in the morning before rallying all the way up to $24,400 in the evening, which corresponded to a 2 percent increase in its price.
The weekend of August 13-14 started with one more push from buyers on Saturday to break the $25,000 level, which resulted in a new failure.
We saw the exact same scenario on Sunday and Monday – early buying strength than full retrace in the second part of the session. BTC lost 1 percent on Sunday and is trading in red midday on Monday.
ETH/USD
The Ethereum Project token ETH closed its fifth consecutive weekly candle in green on Sunday, August 7. It added 1.5 percent to its valuation on a seven-day basis making it a total of 92 percent since hitting a 1.5-year-low of $886 in mid-June.
On Monday, August 8 the coin jumped 4.7 percent up to $1,783 once again hitting the horizontal resistance. This time again bulls were rejected there, so they were forced to retreat down to $1,700 on Tuesday losing 4.4 percent of the ETH’s market cap.
The Relative Strength Index (RSI) has been in the overbought area since mid-July while the 24-hour trading volumes remained below the average. They were also decreasing in divergence with the price rally.
On the weekly chart, however, we could see that the ETH token was still not in the overbought zone and with a lot bigger trading volumes than during the entire June 2021 – June 2022 period.
The ETH/USDT pair jumped 9.5 percent on the good inflation data from the United States thus reaching the $1,846 mark and entering the resistance zone.
The $1,900 – $1,950 was a solid support/resistance area on the bigger timeframes and this time it was in synch with the 21-period EMA on weekly.
On Thursday, August 11, the leading altcoin made one step up – to $1,883 after reaching $1,940 intraday.
The Friday session was no different and ETH continued to climb North. It added 4.5 percent and stopped at $1,960.
The coin formed its fourth consecutive candle in green on Saturday, August 13 peaking above $2,000 for the first time since May,30.
On Sunday, however, it made a slight pullback to $1,939 thus losing 2.8 percent. It is trading even lower as of the time of writing this market update on Monday.
Leading Majors
- SHIBA INU (SHIB)
The second most popular meme coin (after Dogecoin) is once again on its way up.
The SHIB/USDT pair found its bottom on June 18 but since then was struggling to surpass the daily timeframe horizontal resistance making a few unsuccessful attempts to break it in the two-month period between June 21 and August 13.
On Sunday, August 14, bulls finally make reached their goal and push the price 35 percent up to move above the 200-day EMA.
Shiba Inu has at least 15 more percent until hitting the next major resistance unless the January 2022 low turns into a new obstacle on the way.
SHIB is ranked at #30 with a market cap of approximately $9.22 billion.
Altcoin of the week
The best performing digital asset among the Top 100 biggest cryptocurrencies was a previously unknown token by the name of Aerarium. As per CoinGecko Aerarium Fi (AERA) is currently ranked at #32 with a total market cap of approximately $2.6 billion. AERA is described as the first Treasury-as-a-Service coin that is paying regular rewards to its holders (reminding us of the OlympusDAO and Wonderland type of DeFi protocols).
It is currently operating on an Ethereum Layer 2 roll-up protocol called Metis that is promising to solve all Layer 1 biggest problems with its current implementation. As per data from DeFiLlama, the Metis Ecosystem consists of more than 20 protocols and has more than $56 million of total values locked.
The AERA coin itself can be traded only on the Hermes Protocol’s DEX on the Metis chain. It added 152 percent to its value during last week’s trading and is currently priced at $7.6. It will be hard to predict the coin’s direction given the fact it is in price discovery mode already.
Chart from Hermes Protocol:
