Crypto Market Back Above $1 Trillion As Bitcoin, Ether, Cardano, Polygon Lead Gains In Relief Rally

Bitcoin kicked off on a strong note Monday after a captivating week of consistent gains. The cryptocurrency trades at $21,558 after gaining over 3% in the past 24 hours. On the other hand, Ethereum is trading at $1,480 after adding 8.63% and over 30% consecutively in the past day and week.

Other cryptocurrencies have also benefited from the uplift, with Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, and Avalanche gaining over 7%, 3.11%, 4.36%, and 6.50%, respectively. MATIC has been the biggest gainer in the top 15 category coins after surging over 18% in the past 24 hours. The global cryptocurrency market cap has also regained the $1 Trillion mark after a 3.92% increase over the last day and is currently sitting at $1.02 trillion, according to data from  CoinGecko.

As ZyCrypto previously reported, apart from the ongoing geopolitical tensions and damaging fight against inflation worsening the crypto winter, Bitcoin’s sell-off in the first half was exacerbated by miners dumping their coins. Public Bitcoin miners dumped 20-40% of their mining rewards from January to April before selling almost 400% of BTC production in June following the deterioration of market conditions. 

Public miners now hold an aggregate of 35,054 BTC, a stark contrast from the 46,026 BTC they held at the beginning of May. Experts now believe that aggressive selling could subside with most liabilities being paid for.

“I think we have now been through the worst bitcoin selling from the public miners. They will keep selling a larger share of their production than they did in the first months of 2022 due to decreased access to external capital, but the extreme bitcoin sales we saw in June will not persist,” said Jason Mallory, analyst at Arcane Research.

According to him, “unless the bitcoin price drops further,” public miners may not be willing to sell more BTC, given that their holdings have already been reduced significantly. 

Data from crypto analytics firm Glassnode has also shown that hodlers are increasingly unwilling to spend at the lower process. “Over 80% of the total USD-denominated wealth invested in BTC has been hodled for at least three months,” the firm tweeted over the weekend. Moreover, with Bitcoin having weathered the LUNA and DeFi-induced liquidity crisis – the two largest capitulation events for BTC by volume loss since 2011- experts believe that the worst risk has been flushed out of the system, laying a foundation for Bitcoin to rally.

Technically, traders are closely watching if the price will break out of a symmetrical triangle pattern that has been in formation since mid-June after the price found support along the 2017 top of $19,800.

Should the price break out of this squeeze to the upside, a push higher to $28,000 could follow.