Bitcoin Hits 9-Month High Above $27,500

Largest Cryptocurrency Continues To Outperform As Dominance Rises Above 45%

As crypto markets surge Friday — their fourth daily rally this week — Bitcoin continues to outperform and briefly topped $27,500 for the first time since June 2022.

Heading into the weekend, Bitcoin is up nearly 10% since yesterday and more than 35% over the past seven days, according to data from CoinGecko.

Meanwhile, Ether has rallied 27% over the past week and is trading above $1,800 for the first time since September 2022.

Bitcoin’s share of the crypto economy is also at a six-month high, accounting for 46% of the industry’s global market capitalization. In September and again in November, that measure, commonly called “Bitcoin dominance,” flirted with a calendar-year low, briefly dropping below 40%.

Just after 3 p.m. New York time, only seven tokens with a market capitalization above $500M have posted gains relative to Bitcoin in the preceding 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Since the initial coin offering boom in 2017 minted a new class of blue-chip crypto tokens, Bitcoin dominance has been considered a flight to safety within the crypto economy.

Bitcoin dominance spiked this week as a crisis that felled three US banks spread to Europe, causing shares of Credit Suisse to plummet. 

Investors “sought refuge in BTC and ETH,” according to research from TradingView, “demonstrating a similar self-custody response pattern to the FTX collapse.”

“On a USD basis, the last month saw over $1.8B in combined BTC and ETH value flow out of exchanges,” TradingView noted, “reflecting a remarkable appreciation for self-custody of trustless assets.”

Banking concerns have also led investors to believe the Federal Reserve will moderate its rapid pace of interest-rate hikes, which have battered high-risk, high-reward assets over the past year. 

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