Bitcoin teases $29.5K, Ether drops as 'accumulator season' begins

Bitcoin (BTC) moved through the East Asia afternoon trading day just shy of $29,500, sitting comfortably at $29,404, as the CoinDesk Indicies bitcoin trend indicator put the world’s largest digital asset at neutral.

Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market value, slid down 0.66% to $1,864, according to CoinDesk data.

In a recent market update note, Singapore-based QCP Capital said this is the season of accumulators.

Despite BTC and ETH's indifferent response to macroeconomic factors and their current sideways trading, the market anticipates a rise in volatility and a possible significant BTC price increase by year's end due to factors like the Blackrock spot ETF ruling and the Bitcoin Halving, with Accumulators emerging as an effective strategy for accredited investors to acquire coins at discounted prices steadily, they wrote.

Elsewhere, Galaxy Digital’s Mike Novogratz recently said in an interview with Bloomberg that “the most important thing that happened this year in Bitcoin is Larry Fink,” emphasizing his bullishness about the world’s largest digital currency post-ETF filing.

“Larry was a nonbeliever. Now he says, ‘Hey, this is going to be a global currency.’ People around the world all trust it,” Novogratz said, while also mentioning that Galaxy Digital is committed to maintaining a presence in New York.

Novogratz also said that his ideal portfolio for a young person with risk tolerance is shares of Alibaba, silver, gold, bitcoin, and ether.

Meanwhile, Joe DiPasquale, the CEO of crypto fund manager BitBull Capital, said bitcoin’s ability to shrug off macroeconomic events, or even material technical events like the Curve Finance exploit, has created a recent “sustained sentiment shift” to the upside in the markets.

“Notably, now that the Fed's interest rate hike is also priced, the fact that Bitcoin and ETH have both maintained their price levels, should give bulls additional confidence,” DiPasquale wrote in a note to CoinDesk.

BitBull’s DiPasquale is not expecting “an overnight surge in the market,” and sees 2024’s halving as the next major price spur. “Until then, bulls will do well to accumulate when opportune and bears may want to practice vigilant risk management,” he wrote.

Elsewhere in the market, Curve’s CRV token has begun to recover, up 6.4% in the last hour to 64 cents. It’s down nearly 12% in the last 24 hours after an exploit put $100 million worth of crypto at risk.