Bitcoin holds its range, but pressure mounts

Market picture

Crypto market capitalisation has fallen 3% over the past seven days to $1.17 trillion. The Fear and Greed Index is at 56 (greed), having corrected from 62 a week earlier. Capitalisation has stabilised at $1.20 trillion in the first half of the week and at 1.18 in the second half. Capitalisation falls early on Monday, following the downtrend in global equity indices. 

Bitcoin starts the week near $30.20K, having fended off attempts to break below a meaningful round level since the second half of last week. However, Bitcoin failed to break out of its range at the beginning of last week, where it has been consolidating for the past three weeks. We should be prepared for BTCUSD to go deeper into a correction just below $29.0K. 

Ethereum lost 5.7% to $1860. Other leading altcoins in the top 10 fell between 0.2% (Tron) and 17% (Litecoin). The exception was Solana (+6.7%). 

News background

According to JPMorgan, the approval of a spot bitcoin ETF will not significantly impact the crypto market. Such funds exist in Canada and Europe but have yet to attract significant investor interest. In addition, last year, the outflow of funds from gold ETFs did not benefit bitcoin funds, including futures ETFs.

Lightning Labs, the company behind the second-tier Lightning Network solution, has unveiled a set of tools that will make it easier for AI systems to work with the Bitcoin blockchain and the Lightning Network itself.

According to The Block Data, Binance's market share decline has accelerated following the departure of several top executives. Only 58% of the total cryptocurrency trading volume is now on the platform.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has denied media claims that the company has been struggling with senior staff for months.

The company's lawyer said the BarnBridge DAO protocol is facing a non-public investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The filing of claims against BarnBridge could indicate that the SEC is looking beyond targeting large cryptocurrency companies and has turned its attention to smaller players in the crypto market.