Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)
Last night until this morning, the cryptocurrency market was hit hard again.
OKX market data shows that around 8:10 this morning, BTC briefly fell below 91,000 USDT (with a low of 90,888 USDT), and as of around 10:15 (the same below) it was temporarily reported at 81,899.9 USDT, a 24-hour drop of 4.31%.
The Altcoin market is even more bloodbath. The two major Altcoin leaders ETH and SOL are competing in misery - affected by the accelerated money laundering of hackers, ETH fell below 2,500 USDT, currently temporarily reported at 2,487.01 USDT, a 24-hour drop of 10.96%; the recently persistently weak SOL has also fallen below 140 USDT, currently temporarily reported at 139.56 USDT, a 24-hour drop of 14.88%.
Looking at the market, apart from a few new coins like IP and LAYER that have recently been launched and can still record positive growth, other coins have generally fallen by more than 10% or even 20%.
Alternative data shows that the Fear and Greed Index has fallen from 49 to 25 today, returning to the "extreme fear" state for the first time in 5 months.
In terms of derivatives data, Coinglass data shows that there was 956 million US dollars in liquidations across the network in the past 24 hours, the vast majority of which were long positions, amounting to 885 million US dollars. In terms of currencies, BTC had 278 million US dollars in liquidations and ETH had 203 million US dollars in liquidations.
Will it go down to 70,000 next?
Amid the volatile market, several big shots have already given their own forecasts on the future market trend.
Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of BitMEX, who has been "bearish to 70,000" since the end of January, has once again given his analysis. Arthur said that many IBIT holders are hedge funds, who earn higher returns than short-term US Treasuries by going long on ETFs and short on CME futures, and if the BTC price drop causes the basis to shrink, these funds will sell IBIT and buy back CME futures. These funds are currently profitable, and considering that the basis is close to the US Treasury yield, they will unwind their positions and realize their profits during the US trading session. In short, Arthur emphasized that he will continue to be bearish on Bitcoin to $70,000.
Another highly influential institutional heavyweight, Chris Burniske, a partner at Placeholder, offered a different view. Burniske still believes this is just a mid-bull market correction, not the start of a bear market, and reminds everyone to recall that BTC, ETH, SOL and other Altcoins also experienced corrections of over 50% during the big bull market in 2021.
The Altcoin leaders are struggling to hold on
Compared to the increasingly stock-like BTC, what retail investors are more concerned about now may be the future performance of the two major Altcoin leaders ETH and SOL, but the outlook is not optimistic at the moment.
ETH has recently suffered a major setback, as the ETH Denver event was supposed to be an excellent opportunity to revive the faith of the entire Ethereum community, but the sudden $150 million Bybit hacking incident dealt a heavy blow to ETH.
A few days ago, ETH holders could still console themselves with "Bybit will buy it back" and "the hacker's selloff may take years", but now Bybit has basically replenished the stolen ETH from the OTC and lending channels, and the potential buying demand has been eliminated; at the same time, the hacker's money laundering speed has far exceeded market expectations, with over 20% of the funds washed away in just a few days.
The situation for SOL is even more bleak. On the one hand, affected by malicious events like LIBRA, the wealth effect of meme tokens is gradually disappearing, and SOL's "gold shovel" attribute is declining; on the other hand, the large-scale SOL auction unlocking scheduled for March 1 has also caused some holders to choose to avoid the limelight and withdraw to observe.
"Across-the-board bull market" is hard to repeat, "de-faking and keeping the real" is underway
In summary, as the market evolves to this stage, the long-awaited "Altcoins" seem to be fading away, and this bull market is increasingly becoming a solo dance of BTC.
As for the future trend of Altcoins, I personally tend to agree with the sharing of Evgeny Gaevoy, the founder and CEO of Wintermute, at the Hong Kong Consensus conference last week - there will be no more across-the-board bull markets, and investors will focus more on protocols with real utility and sustainable economic models.
The entire cryptocurrency industry seems to be undergoing a large-scale "de-faking and keeping the real", and perhaps after the "sand" has been swept away, the real "gold" will finally see its value discovered.
