Bitcoin touches high end of recent range; Dogecoin extends gain

By Carly Wanna and Vildana Hajric

Bitcoin trended toward the high end of its recent range of around $28,000, while Dogecoin continued to benefit from Elon Musk’s flirtation with the meme token. 
 

The largest cryptocurrency by market value rose as much as 3.1% to $28,442 on Tuesday, its first session higher in three. Bitcoin has traded around $28,000 since breaching that level last month for the first time since June. Ether rose about 4.5%, while Polkadot increased 4% and Binance Coin climbed 3.3%.

Dogecoin has jumped about 30% after Twitter users noticed Monday that their home buttons changed into the dog meme after which the cryptocurrency is named. Dogecoin rose to as high as 10.3 cents. 

Twitter didn’t respond Monday to a question about the home button change. Later in the day, the platform’s owner Elon Musk posted a photo of an earlier exchange in which a Twitter user urged him to change the bird logo to a doge. Musk tweeted: “As promised.”  

“BTC had a good monthly and quarterly close Sunday night, so it kept continuing its macro-trend already before Doge and is now trading in a range whilst forming support on the back of of a more bullish sentiment overall in crypto and risk assets,” said Garry Krugljakow, founder of 0VIX, an open-source DeFi protocol for lending and borrowing. “Doge has definitely led the narrative in the past 24 hours.”

Krugljakow added that: “It remains to be seen if Musk is serious about using $DOGE for payments or he is just doing his usual thing.”

Meanwhile, the sales volume of Donald Trump-themed NFTs continues to climb with the former US president slated to be indicted in lower Manhattan on Tuesday. 

Sales volume for the official Trump collection rose 125% in the past 24 hours, to about $36,000, according to tracker NFT Price Floor. The sales volume is still down about 19% over the last 90 days, according to the site. The collection’s floor price — the lowest price someone may pay for an NFT — is standing at $895, up from about $71 in mid-December, but lower than it was in mid-February.

After tumbling in 2022, Bitcoin’s rebound this year made it the best-performing asset in the first quarter, even as a widening US regulatory crackdown and the collapse of a few crypto-adjacent banks have tempered some investors’ enthusiasm. Ether, with a 56% year-to-date gain, has also posted an eye-catching showing. 

“That BTC and ETH can deliver those performances with such strong headwinds is a testament to the tailwinds being even stronger,” wrote Noelle Acheson, author of the “Crypto Is Macro Now” newsletter.

Though crypto prices have recovered at the start of 2023, trading volumes and liquidity in the crypto market have dried up when measured over the past year amid an overall plunge in prices, which has seen Bitcoin drop about 39% — to around $28,000 — and some other coins even more. Investors retreated over that period as a string of scandals scared them away. Analysts are now particularly tuned into how smaller retail investors may behave as they’ve been an integral part of the system, helping to drive up prices during the early pandemic boom. 

“Crypto majors have been range bound,” with Bitcoin oscillating between $26,800-$28,000, wrote B2C2’s Adam Farthing in a note. “The only other really outstanding feature is one of declining volumes, perhaps to be expected in a range-bound market, but perhaps not a healthy signal, as could be construed as an indication of no fresh buyers at current levels.”