Bitcoin (BTC) is losing significant ground in April, but Ethereum and Altcoins are making new highs, according to OKEx

Bitcoin (BTC) lost considerable ground in April 2021, but Ethereum (ETH) and other altcoins rose sharply. OKEx Reports in a comprehensive crypto market update.

April 2021 finally broke BTC’s winning streak “despite being a historically positive month for price action,” the OKEx report said, adding that the leading crypto “ended April with a 3.62% loss. ended after posting a new all-time high of $ 64,847 on April 14, 2021. ”

As noted in the report shared with CI, “the subsequent retracement was supported by local purchasing power for the last week of the month as BTC rose back to USDT57,000 but was not enough to print a green monthly candle.”

Large BTC options hit their expiration dates in April, “continuing to put pressure on the market as the price repeatedly dropped back to maximum pain levels every week,” the report said.

As mentioned in the detailed report:

“The dollar index fell sharply from 93 to around 90 in April before recovering towards the end of the month. The US 10-year Treasury yield also fell from a high of 1.75% in March to a low of 1.53% in April. These factors resulted in a general upward movement in risk-weighted assets. However, the volatility index, or VIX, which indicates market expectations for volatility in the stock markets, remains close to the bottom. “

As noted in OKEx’s market update, BTC lagged global assets from a return perspective in April with a monthly decline of 3.62%. The S&P 500 Index and the Nasdaq Composite rose steadily over the past month, posting “monthly returns of 5.3% and 5.4%, respectively”.

The Bloomberg Commodity Index posted its best monthly rise (8.3%) in nearly a year on the “rebound” in inflation, and gold rose 3.6% for the month “on a weaker dollar,” the report added .

The report also found that Bitcoin “maintained its strong upward momentum in early April, benefiting in large part from the hype surrounding Coinbase’s IPO”. OKEx’s quarterly BTC futures contract premium “rose to more than 10%,” the report revealed, adding that the in-futures premium was “inevitably captured by arbitrageurs, and on the day of direct listing by Coinbase on the Nasdaq, Bitcoin went into a downward spiral as market participants sold the news. “

As stated in the OKEx Crypto Market Update:

“A major occurred on the third Sunday in April when liquidity was tight. A 16% drop caused the price to drop from $ 61,000 to $ 50,900, triggering the largest 24-hour publicly traded liquidations ever at $ 9.54 billion. On the same day, BTC’s open interest on OKEx dropped 27% and wasn’t able to return to pre-collapse levels until the end of the month. “

During this “flash” crash, the quarterly and bi-quarterly futures were “short but well below the perpetual swap price”. The update revealed that this “unusual occurrence in a bull market took many traders by surprise”.

The report also mentioned that Bitcoin “did not really begin to recover after making a false downward break to USDT 47,000 levels”. “Last week’s rapid rebound was driven by spot buying and the market leader closed the month at $ 57,142 per OKEx spot price,” the report added.

The OKEx report goes on to say:

“ETH posted its eighth consecutive month of profit in April … and a 48% rally last month is also the best monthly profit since January 2021. Ethereum’s Berlin fork went live on April 14th and market participants seem confident that the ETH price is ahead of you This summer’s hard fork in London … the ETH price rose from 1,850 USDT in early April to 2,800 USDT by the end of the month. “

Ethereum’s dramatic surge “drove the altcoin season towards yet another high,” the report added, while noting that the altcoin season index “hit a high of 98 in mid-April.” The last time this was observed was “early 2018”, confirmed the OKEx team. This also resulted in Bitcoin’s dominance dropping 17% to less than 50% by the end of the month, the report added.

The report continued:

“[DogeCoin] hit a whopping 487% increase in April, driven by the momentum of the ongoing Twitter hype from Elon Musk and its notoriously active community over the past few months. DOGE ended the month with a market cap of $ 42 billion and got into the top five cryptocurrencies by market cap of the major aggregators. “

OKEx’s report noted that “market participants have switched from BTC to older altcoins that were popular at the last bull run in 2017”. As a result, XRP and Ethereum Classic (ETC) grew 186% and 167% respectively in April, while other major altcoins, with the exception of Polkadot (DOT), also performed positively, ”the report confirmed.

It’s worth noting that the crypto market has suffered two major shocks recently Elon Musk‘s Tesla BTC payments are no longer accepted due to concerns about the overuse of fossil fuels by the cryptocurrency (which will be consumed during Bitcoin mining).

Co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin donated around $ 1.5 billion worth of cryptocurrencies to various nonprofits – including a $ 1 billion donation to a COVID-19 relief fund in India.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is donating $ 1.14 billion worth of meme coins to Covid-19 hit India

– ETCI (@ET_CIO), May 13, 2021

These transactions or moves by Buterin and Musk have made the risky and unstable price movements in the digital asset markets even more volatile.

BTC price has fallen below $ 50,000 at the time of writing, and Ethereum price is below $ 3,700 after breaking above the $ 4,300 mark recently.