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Bitcoin Suisse

Bitcoin Surge, SEC Talks and Ethereum's Rally

Nov 10, 2023 - 10 min read

What happened last week

Bitcoin has extended its upwards trajectory this week, most notably yesterday’s surge which culminated in a large candle topping out at $37’999 before being sold off towards $36’500, where we still trade currently. The moves triggered almost half a billion $ worth of futures positions to be liquidated, both short ($272M) and long positions ($218M) were caught by the squeeze and the sudden retraction afterwards. The open interest on Binance’s Futures platform has dropped by 14% in the past 24h, meanwhile the CME BTC futures have reached an all-time high in number of outstanding contracts. The piece of news that sparked the rally was a report that said that the SEC is in a dialogue with Grayscale on the topic of their Grayscale BTC Trust. The SEC did not comment on the matter. On Thursday the news broke that Blackrock is in the process of setting up an Ethereum Trust in Delaware, which could be a preparatory measure for a future ETH-Spot ETF application. The ETH price reacted strongly and quickly, rising by 6.4% within 2 hours, the rally continued throughout Thursday night and led to ETH climbing to $2’136, a level not seen in over half a year. ETH has since receded a small portion of the gains and is trading at $2’091 at time of writing.

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Source: TradingView


Our take

It is remarkable how sensitive Crypto prices still react to rumored developments on various Spot-BTC ETF’s. The ETF narrative is clearly the driver behind recent moves, positive news and non-news have resulted in many a green candle, while geopolitics and economic data have faded into the background. This is the exact opposite of the behavior that could be seen throughout 2022, when the impact of positive news was by far exceeded by the impact of negative ones. Admittedly, the frequency and magnitude of the Crypto-specific bad news of 2023 pales in comparison to the series of apocalyptic events the ecosystem suffered in 2022. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index shows that since late October the sentiment has quickly shifted from neutral to moderate levels of greed. If this ETF tunnel-vision continues to be the status quo until the SEC has made up their mind, then we are likely to see sharp reactions on every piece of news that hints towards the approval rather than rejection of the ETF’s.


The week ahead

Tuesday, 14 November 2023

  • U.S. Headline Inflation Rate (expected: 3.3 YoY)
  • U.S. Core Inflation Rate (expected: 4.1% YoY)

Wednesday, 15 November 2023

  • U.K. Inflation Figures (expected: 4.8% YoY)
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Bitcoin Suisse