Dec. 13, 2024

CoinDesk 20 Index: 3,830.21  -1.01%
Bitcoin (BTC): $100,312.53  -0.46%
Ether (ETH): $3,918.30  -0.95%
S&P 500: 6,051.25  -0.54%
Gold: $2,670.09  -0.57%
Nikkei 225: 39,470.44  -0.95%

Bitcoin traded little changed, holding around 0.35% higher than at 4 p.m. ET on Thursday. The rally from Wednesday's CPI data appeared to have hit a roadblock when Thursday's PPI came in hotter than expected prompting investors to tighten their stances and keep a bid for the dollar. Still, Fed fund futures remain confident of a 25 basis-point interest-rate cut next week, with traders remaining in bullish mode. The sentiment is reflected in the $64.8 million open interest for active BTC call options on Derive, the leading on-chain options protocol. That's six times larger than the open interest in put options. Ether traders are also leaning heavily toward calls, figures from Amberdata show. 

Donald Trump-backed World Liberty Financial increased its holdings of Chainlink’s LINK token. The project purchased another $1 million worth of LINK late Thursday for the second straight day, increasing its stash to $2 million worth. It also bought $246,000 worth of Aave’s AAVE, taking total token holdings to $1.2 million. LINK prices are up 22% in the past 7 days and more than 130% since World Liberty Financial first bought the token, helping it reach price levels last seen in early 2021. LINK neared $30 in Asian morning hours Friday, data shows, with open interest on the token’s futures zooming to record highs above $860 million.

Crypto miners are adopting the accumulation strategy set by Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy, JPMorgan said in a research report. The shift to building up bitcoin holdings is driven by growing pressure on profitability, which stems from the reward halving in April and a rising network hashrate, the report said. "This likely prompted miners to hoard or seek further investments into bitcoin or diversify into AI/HPC businesses," analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote, referring to artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Miners such as MARA Holdings have adopted a similar bitcoin-buying strategy to MicroStrategy, called BTC yield, in response to these challenges, JPMorgan said. MARA now owns 35,000 tokens ($3.5 billion) and is the second-largest publicly listed corporation in terms of bitcoin holdings.

Bitcoin remains in a key trading range around $100,000, rising above and dropping below the key psychological number on multiple occasions. A lot of this has to do with the enormous selling pressure from long-term holders (LTH) or investors who have held bitcoin for longer than 155 days.

Since September, LTHs have sold 843,113 BTC while short-term holders (STHs) have accumulated 1,081,633 BTC. 

To show the difference in trading volumes between long-term and short-term holders, we compare them to other big players in the industry, such as MicroStrategy, which holds 423,650 bitcoin. In addition, U.S. ETFs now hold over 1 million bitcoin.

For context, since September, MicroStrategy has accumulated 197,250 BTC, which works out to roughly 2,168 BTC a day. The U.S. ETFs have accumulated approximately 205,000 BTC, or 2,253 BTC a day. The U.S. ETF BTC balance has grown from 916,000 BTC to 1.12 million BTC.

In order for bitcoin to conclusively break higher of $100,000, LTHs will need to dial down on offloading their tokens or have bigger cohorts enter the space and pick up the buys.

- Omkar Godbole