Bitcoin Regains $66,000, but Mt. Gox Selling Pressure Persists

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(CoinMasa)

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Bitcoin has regained $66,000 after falling below $65,500 on Tuesday, but ongoing selling pressure related to Mt. Gox has diminished the chances of a sustained recovery. According to Arkham data, Mt. Gox moved $3 billion worth of BTC between different wallets. As a result, it sent $130 million to crypto exchange Bitstamp. The expectation is that lenders will sell their BTC immediately after receiving it, so coin movements tend to affect the price of bitcoin. At the time of writing, BTC is sitting at around $66,500, little changed from 24 hours ago. The broader crypto market, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), was also little changed.

Ether ETFs in the US saw net inflows of around $107 million on their first day of trading, with volumes exceeding $1 billion. BlackRock iShares Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHA) led the way with inflows of $266.5 million, followed by Bitwise’s Ethereum ETF (ETHW) with $204 million. The total trading volume was around a fifth of the bitcoin equivalents experienced during their debut in January. Many market observers had predicted that volume and inflows for ETH ETFs would be lackluster due to the lack of a staking mechanism. Ether traded just below $3,500 in the Asian and European morning, about 1.3% lower than 24 hours earlier.

Few bitcoin miners have the same power as Iris Energy, Canaccord said in a report Tuesday. “The company is building 510 MW of data centers by 2024, providing 2,160 MW of power capacity and has a development pipeline of over 1 GW,” the analysts wrote. The brokerage raised its target for the company to $15 from $12, while maintaining a buy rating. Iris Energy was trading 3% higher at $11.23 in premarket trading on Nasdaq. Earlier this month, Iris shares fell 14% after a short seller said the Childress, Texas site was not suitable for hosting AI or high-performance computing. “We believe management will be opportunistic in expanding the use case for its data centers beyond bitcoin mining and is well prepared from a power, cooling and network perspective,” Canaccord wrote.

Chart of the Day

(Velocity Data)

The chart shows the difference between ETH futures prices on a three-monthly basis, i.e. the futures price and the spot price.

Futures are currently trading at a significantly lower premium compared to Q1.

This could demotivate “carry or base investors” and lead to weakened interest in US-listed spot ETH ETFs.

Spot BTC ETFs, launched in January, are preferred by carry traders who aim to profit from price differences between spot and futures markets.

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– Omkar Godbole

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