Bitcoin edged toward $24,000 early Wednesday, dropped, but then rebounded to hold strong above $23,600.
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The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was recently trading at about $23,663, up 2.3% over the past 24 hours.
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Bitcoin (BTC)’s failure to regain the $25,000 threshold it surpassed in mid-February and recent consolidation “could be a sign of weakness, at least in the short-term,” Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at foreign exchange market maker Oanda, wrote in a Wednesday note.
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Ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency, recently jumped more than 4% to recently trade around $1,665. The CoinDesk Market Index that measures crypto market performance was up around 2.9% for the day.
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Decentralized finance (DeFi) lending and borrowing platform Maker’s native MKR token saw a nearly 19% surge over the past 24 hours. Data from CoinGlass showed that traders who bet on price shifts liquidated more than $444,000 of MKR short positions in the past 24 hours. That was more than 16 times the $27,000 of MKR long positions that investors liquidated over the same period. These types of short squeezes have historically tended to accelerate price jumps.
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In a tweet last week, blockchain analytics firm Santiment noted the largest whale moves involving MKR in three months with more than 24,000 of the tokens worth around $17.4 million at the time “moved to a whale address” and a subsequent identically sized move. Santiment viewed the moves as bullish.
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“On downswings, massive moves like this are often correlated with turnarounds," Santiment wrote.
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Meanwhile, traditional markets turned mixed on Wednesday as the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite recently slid 0.4% and 0.6%, respectively. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) was up 0.02%.
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In the aftermath of several disappointing indicators suggesting that inflation remains problematic, investors increasingly expect the U.S. central bank to continue raising interest rates in upcoming months, although a fourth consecutive monthly contraction in the Institute of Supply Management (ISM) Manufacturing PMI data offered some evidence of an economic slowdown.
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Macroeconomic concerns pushed the 10-year Treasury yield to over 4% Wednesday – the first time since last November.
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“We want prices to rise at a much slower rate than they are now, so disinflation will need to occur for that to happen,” Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at brokerage firm Interactive Brokers, wrote in a Wednesday note, referencing Fed Chair Jerome Powell's repeated use the term of “disinflation” in February.
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“We should all welcome the time when disinflation becomes a lasting feature of our economy,” Sosnick continued. “But for now, the disinflation that we might have seen late last year appears to have been transitory.”
