Technically if only marginally speaking, bitcoin (BTC) closed February higher by a 0.069% increment, though without that 9.5% single-day rally on 15 February in response to US tech stocks pumping, the story would have been quite a bit different.
There was little hope of matching January’s runaway performance, mainly due to the renewed strength of the US dollar on sticky inflation and dissipating hopes of a prolonged risk rally.
What has become more apparent is that BTC is grounding itself in the 23k to 24k range - at least half of February’s end-of-day market prices closed within or close to this range.
The extremely low Bitcoin Volatility Index adds some validity to this range, though as you can see below, volatility spikes always follow a prolonged thumb-twirling session… It’s just a matter of when.
Today’s BTC/USDT performance appears particularly bullish, having added 2.5% to US$23,720 in the Asia trading window, causing short liquidations to outnumber longs by around 7:1 in the past 24 hours.
Expect selling resistance at the US$24,000 price point, and if the bulls should break above, the Binance order book shows an even stiffer selling wall at US$24,200.
Ethereum closed Tuesday at US$1,605, marking a daily 1.7% dip on ETH/USDT yet closing the month at least 1.2% higher.
Ether typically has choppier intraday volatility than bitcoin, though the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency spent the better part of February in its own range of 16k to 17k.
Volatility is like mana for crypto traders, so they must be a bit turned off at the moment. Hell, even the Fear & Greed Index is a boring neutral 50.
But HODLers and those with a long-term investment horizon should at least take comfort in the fact that both headline cryptoassets have remained stable in the face of intense regulatory pressure.
In the altcoin space
What is behind the sustain rally on niche blockchain Stacks?
Its native token STX added another 17% overnight, making it the top performer and bringing week-on-week gains to more than 55%.
Its market capitalisation is at an 11-month high of US$1.4bn and STX token is changing hands at a flat dollar.
Hype surrounding the Ordinals bitcoin NFT project seems to be benefitting Stacks, since the blockchain’s stated purpose is to bring smart contract functionality to the underdeveloped bitcoin ledger.
As pointed out by Cointelegraph, the STX rally is hardly justified given that only around 1,000 unique active wallets engaged with the Stacks application for the whole of February.
Be careful of a pending correction.
Other top overnight movers included SingularityNET (AGIX), Frax Share (FXS) and Maker (MKR).
Among the top-20 set, Litecoin (LTC) steamed ahead with a 4% overnight gain, while Ripple (XRP), Cardano (ADA), Polygon (MATIC) and the rest generally followed the wider market.
Global cryptocurrency market cap added 1.6% to US$1.08tn overnight, while total value locked in the decentralised finance (DeFi) space added 0.8% to head above US$50bn.