Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, remains near $49,000 after failing to break above the key $50,000 threshold. The Bitcoin price was slightly down at the time of publication, trading at $48,281.
BTC/USD 4-hour chart | Source: TradingView
Bitcoin price moved little with Christmas only three days away
Hashrate hit a six-month high, and miners are holding BTC. As we have more short positions than long ones, a short squeeze might happen first before the $24B options expiry on December 31. Estimated leverage ratio has skyrocketed lately.
While BTC hasn’t had much of a recent run, tokens associated with layer 1 protocols and scaling systems, including MATIC and LUNA, were market stars on Wednesday. The two coins have generated strong 30-day returns, despite a recent overall market sell-off.
MATIC’s price hit a record high earlier Wednesday after popular decentralized exchange Uniswap announced it launched on Polygon, a protocol that provides lower transaction costs compared with the Ethereum blockchain.
Ether was also in the red but not far off where it began the day. The small price movement on bitcoin and ether came with continued low trading volume across major centralized exchanges as the market heads into the year-end holiday season.
NEAR jumped 23% to $10.80 on Wednesday after an integration with decentralized payments network Terra was announced by developers yesterday night. NEAR traded at $8.6 on Tuesday night before the announcement. Tokens have traded in a tight range of $8.5 and $9.5 before breaking the latter resistance level on Wednesday morning
The altcoin market recovers unevenly today. The overall cryptocurrency market cap stands at $2.268 trillion, and Bitcoin Dominance is 40.3%.
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