Bitcoin Targets $25,000 In Ultra-Bullish Breakout as Whales Double Down On Gigantic BTC Buys

On Saturday, Bitcoin and Ether, the two biggest crypto assets by market capitalization, saw additional gains as the broader crypto industry kept on its unforeseen surge this year.

At press time, Bitcoin was holding steady at about $22,821 after growing over 10% in the past 24 hours. Bitcoin’s epic surge comes after it encountered minor resistance at around $21,500 on Jan 17, recoiling back to $20,480 mid-week. On the other hand, Ether was trading at $1,670 after posting over 7% gains in the same period.

Other cryptos followed suit, with Solana posting the most gains among the top ten categories of coins by market cap. At press time, SOL was trading at $25.16, up over 18% over the past day, as seen on CoinMarketCap. Cardano, DOGE, XRP and BNB followed closely, gaining about 9%, 7.63%, 5.28% and 5.68% in the same period.

The overnight surge in crypto prices led to 66,850 short traders being liquidated. At press time, the total number of liquidations in the past 24 hours stood at $299.48 million, according to data from Coinglass. Notably, the global crypto market cap grew over 6% overnight to tap $1.04T after losing the $1 trillion threshold last November.  

The surge comes despite fears that a raft of evidence that conditions are still not ready to settle down will deter crypto investors. This week, Genesis Trading became the latest casualty of the industry’s woes, filing for bankruptcy protection after suffering crippling losses following the collapse of FTX and hedge fund Three Arrows capital. Genesis is part of Digital Currency Group, a conglomerate helmed by Barry Silbert, which has been fighting to keep its head up in recent months amid fraud allegations by Gemini.

Despite the bad news, onchain metrics suggest investors are moving past bad narratives and have started positioning themselves for the next bull rally.

Earlier today, crypto analytics platform Santiment attributed Bitcoin’s overnight spike to a wall of money put into purchasing the asset by whales.

“Bitcoin has now surpassed $22.7k for the first time since August 18, 2022. The price rise has come as the large whale tier group of addresses holding 1,000 to 10,000 BTC has collectively accumulated 64,638 ($1.46 billion) BTC in the past 15 days,” the firm tweeted. 

Pierre Rochard, Vice President of Research at Riot Platforms, noted that Bitcoin’s value was likely to keep increasing towards $25,000 as fundamentals keep improving, especially on a relative basis.

“Bullish scenario: we’re exiting disillusionment, getting ready for next year’s halving, bitcoin doing its own thing regardless of macro,” he said. He states, “given the impossibility of predicting BTC’s volatile exchange rate, steady long-term accumulation is the way.”