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Both Bitcoin and Ethereum price rose slightly yesterday.
Right now BTC is at +2.3% from yesterday, and at +1.2% from a week ago, while ETH is at +1.8% from yesterday, and at +0.3% from a week ago.
In other words, the slight losses of the past few days have been recovered.
Bitcoin price: comparison with Ethereum
Last night the price of Bitcoin briefly returned to $30,000.
This is the key level around which it has been oscillating for more than a month and a half now.
Truth be told, since the annual highs of 13 July, near $32,000, it has practically done nothing but fall, so much so that on 24 July it had even fallen below $29,000.
Until yesterday it had continued to fluctuate just below $30,000, with brief excursions below $29,000 as well, but yesterday it seems to have broken this trend of downward lateralization.
However, it is not certain that an uptrend has been triggered, although the hypothesis cannot be ruled out at all.
The fact is that Bitcoin’s price volatility is at lows, and in such cases it often breaks out with significant movements sooner or later.
What’s more, July historically has often been a month of low volatility, while in August it has generally risen slightly. So it is hardly surprising that in July it has in fact fluctuated almost solely within a very narrow range of $29,000 to $30,000, with rare and brief exceptions.
At this point, it would not even be surprising if volatility were to increase in August, causing it to break out of the July range.
Yesterday’s anomaly
Yesterday’s movement, while small, seemed like an anomaly.
In fact, other risk-on assets, such as US equities, performed poorly yesterday after a decidedly positive start to the summer, and the price of gold did not perform well yesterday either.
The only asset in any way related to Bitcoin that went up yesterday was the US dollar, and this is for all intents and purposes an anomaly.
When the dollar goes up, and both equities and gold go down, the price of Bitcoin often goes down as well. Instead, despite the fact that it was not going through a particularly strong period, the price of BTC rebounded slightly yesterday, thanks in part to the news that people at BlackRock are very confident about the approval of their application for a spot Bitcoin ETF.
One small anomaly like that is not enough to say that the trend has changed, but putting all these things together it does not seem entirely unlikely that such a thing has happened.
The price of Ethereum
The price of ETH has followed a similar trend, although yesterday’s rebound was led by Bitcoin itself.
On 14 July ETH had surpassed $2,000, and then followed a downward path that ended on 7 August at just over $1,800.
Yesterday it first climbed back up to $1,850, and then touched a daily high just below $1,880.
As can be seen, Ethereum’s price trend does not perfectly track that of Bitcoin, and indeed at an even lower volatility.
This is despite the fact that the new stablecoin launched by PayPal (PYUSD) is precisely on Ethereum, and in theory could lead to greater use of ETH in the future.
It therefore appears that these days Bitcoin is driving the market, and Ethereum simply follows close behind.
The BTC/ETH ratio
Analyzing the ratio of Bitcoin’s market capitalization to that of Ethereum reveals that until 30 July it had declined, from 2.64 to 2.51 times, but in August it rose again.
It is now in fact just under 2.6 times, which is not much lower than its level at the end of June.
At the beginning of June, however, it had fallen to 2.3, and the 2023 peak of this metric was reached in late June at 2.66.
Therefore, it can be said that at this time Bitcoin appears to be quite strong in the crypto markets, even more so than Ethereum.
Despite this, its current dominance (nearly 49%) is still below the maximum recorded this year of 50.5%.