Source: Odaily
Author: Nanzi
Since the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF, the price of Bitcoin has soared, with only a small step away from the $100,000 mark. However, in this bull market, only "Bitcoin has risen", and the proportion of Bitcoin's total market capitalization in the crypto market has been rising steadily.
Will the altcoin season come again? Or has the $100,000 Bitcoin already reached the peak of the bull market? We compared the data of the past four years to answer this question.
Data Source
The data involved in this article includes ① Bitcoin price, ② Bitcoin contract funding rate, ③ Bitcoin contract trading volume, ④ Bitcoin contract active buy trading volume, ⑤ stablecoin total market capitalization, ⑥ crypto market total market capitalization, ⑦ Bitcoin total market capitalization, ⑧ Nasdaq trading volume, etc.
Among them, the contract price in ① comes from Binance, and the spot price comes from CoinGecko; ②-④ data comes from Binance contracts; ⑤, ⑥, ⑦ come from CoinGecko and defillama; ⑧ comes from Yahoo Finance.
Key Points of the Charts
This article aims to "qualitatively" explore the stage of market development rather than quantitative analysis, so in order to improve the readability of the charts, the charts involved in this article are drawn using Origin, and except for the "stablecoin market capitalization" data,all data has been smoothed (parameters are Savitzky-Golay smoothing, window size 30, 2nd order fitting, with a high degree of smoothing,readers are advised to focus only on the trend changes, and any numbers that need to be focused on individually will be pointed out directly in the text).
Looking back, what data indicates the arrival of the top? Funding rate
Funding rate is undoubtedly one of the most well-known and intuitive data. We first reviewed the first big bull market from January to May 2021, and the relationship between Bitcoin funding rate and Bitcoin price is shown in the following figure:
From this, we can obtain a very significant rule, that the peak price and the extreme funding rate coexist, and the funding rate extreme value often appears before the price peak. The three extreme values of the funding rate appeared in early January, mid-to-late February, and mid-April, respectively, corresponding to the prices of $40,000, $45,000, and $60,000.
But at the same time, it should be noted that high funding rate does not necessarily mean absolute top, and the rise in funding rate is more obvious in the early stage of the bull market.
The Bitcoin funding rate and trend from the end of 2023 to April 2024 are shown in the following figure:
It can be seen that the market has become much "calmer" around 2024, and although Bitcoin has hit a new high, the funding rate has not broken through the 0.1% mark again (the maximum value occurred on March 5, with a price of 66839 USDT). However, we can see thatthe funding rate reached its peak before the price reached its high point.
Active Buy Trading Volume
Here we have chosen the active buy trading volume of Bitcoin contracts on Binance as the research object, and also selected January-May 2021 as the research period. It can also be clearly seen that this indicator is a "reverse indicator" or a "lagging indicator".
The peak of active buy trading volume is often later than the price peak, and during the process of price decline, the active buy trading volume rises faster, indicating that users in 2021 preferred to buy the dips actively.
The data from the end of 2023 to April 2024 is shown as follows, and it is quite amazing that this indicator has become a "leading indicator" again,the active buy trading volume appears synchronously or slightly earlier than the price peak, and the volatility is larger and more significant,it is expected to become an effective reference indicator.
Stablecoin Market Capitalization
In the 2021 bull market, the Federal Reserve's unlimited QE and the influx of hot money from outside the circle drove the crazy issuance of USDT by Tether, accelerating the progress of the bull market. We first reviewed the total market value of USDT and the total market value of cryptocurrencies from 2021 to 2023 as follows:
It can be seen that stablecoins have no correlation with the trend on a small scale, and the perspective needs to be expanded to the annual line level to show a slight correlation.
Bitcoin Price and Altcoin Season
The Bitcoin price, Bitcoin market capitalization, altcoin total market capitalization and market capitalization share in the past 4.5 years are shown in the following figure:
Considering 2020 and 2021 alone, when Bitcoin's first wave was launched, the altcoin market share plummeted, and then quietly turned around in early 2021, the higher Bitcoin rose, the higher the altcoin share.
Coming back to the present, Bitcoin has already completed the first and second waves of launches, but the decline in altcoin share is not rapid, and there is no obvious sign of bottoming out and rebounding yet.
In terms of trend, it is difficult to be rigid, but in terms of absolute value, the two key occupancy rates in the previous bull market were 30% at the bottom in early January 2021, and 40% in mid-February 2021, and the current value is 46%, not far from the nearest launch point.
Market Activity
Last week, on-chain analyst @ai_9684 xtpa posted on X platform that "since Binance launched the GOAT contract at the end of October, I have clearly felt that Binance's attitude towards Memecoins has begun to change. In the past 30 trading days (2024.10.07 - 11.15), Binance's trading volume is 10% higher than Nasdaq and twice that of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 16 times that of Coinbase, accounting for about 50% of the global centralized exchange trading volume.
First ask if, then ask what--has the market trading volume reached a historical peak?After data review, we found thaton November 12, the Bitcoin contract trading volume reached the fourth highest record in the past 4 years(the top three occurred on March 5, August 5, and February 28, 2024, respectively), andthe fifth highest point was on May 19, 2021.
Does the trading volume peak mean the market top?The data of the past four years is shown in the following figure:
It can be seen that only three peaks exceeded $30 billion,and the first two appeared near the top.
(Note: The actual peak trading volume is $50 billion to $60 billion, and the extreme value is smoothed out in this case.)
What stage are we in?
In summary, funding rate, active buy trading volume, and total trading volume are leading indicators of the market, and the total trading volume has issued a warning, so what stage are the other two indicators in?
The funding rate is shown as follows,it can be seen that the funding rate is still at a low point, far from the frenzy of this year's March, let alone 2021.
The active buy trading volume is shown in the following figure, and this indicator also hit a new high on November 21.
