First Mover Asia: Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index Sinks Into Neutral Territory, a Sign of Investor Uncertainty

Good morning. Here’s what’s happening:

Prices: Bitcoin slogs below $30K while LINK soars. Other major cryptos spend their day in negative territory.

Insights: Bitcoin's Fear and Greed Index reflects a market that hasn't been going anywhere fast for the better part of six weeks.

Prices - Markets Remain Sluggish, but Not LINK

A tumbling tech sector and rising dollar on Thursday kept crypto investors in their recent, rangebound trance.

Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, was recently trading at $29,809, down slightly over the past 24 hours. At one point during the day, BTC dipped perilously near a one-month low set earlier this week near $29,500. More than five weeks after spiking following multiple spot bitcoin ETF filings, bitcoin has been unable to escape the $30,000 to $31,000 range – at least for long.

“There’s a lot of bearish sentiment on Crypto Twitter about this pullback, but I think the factors behind it are pretty simple," Anthony Georgiades, co-founder of NFT and Web3 blockchain Pastel Network, wrote in an email to CoinDesk.

Georgiades noted that the tech sell-off that was at least partly spurred by comments from Tesla founder Elon Musk that the electric car maker might have to reduce prices, and the strengthening dollar, had weighed on "bitcoin and the broader crypto market."

Ether, the second largest crypto in market value, was recently changing hands at $1,892, up a smidgen from Wednesday, same time. Most other major cryptos by market cap spent Thursday slogging into the red with XRP losing some of its big gains from the day before to trade below 80 cents – recently off more than 4%, and ADA and SOL, the tokens of smart contract platforms Cardano and Solana, down nearly as much.

The big exception was LINK, the native currency of the Chainlink software platform that connects blockchains with external data. It recently soared by more than 20% to trade above $8 after whales acquired more than $6 million of the token, an apparent reaction to Chainlink's release of an interoperability protocol.

The CoinDesk Market Index, a measure of crypto markets performance was recently down 0.1%.

Equity markets were mixed with the Dow Jones Industrial Average continuing a recent winning streak but the Nasdaq plummeting more than 2% on the Tesla news and soft earnings by streaming service Netflix. In a note to CoinDesk, Mark Connors, head of research at Canadian digital asset manager 3iQ, also highlighted missed results by Taiwan Semiconductor, which put "an extra hit on AI stocks." The dollar index tipped downward to continue a recent trend.

Still, Pastel Network's Georgiades was cautiously upbeat about crypto markets. "The underlying sentiment hasn’t changed much since yesterday or the preceding days," he wrote. I know the permabears have been calling for a major selloff, but it seems less likely that this is in the cards.

He added: "Monetary conditions are likely to loosen here soon, and that will help serve as a catalyst for risk-on assets.”