Bitcoin was trading steadily near $109,000 during Asian hours on Thursday, extending wide-range play since the Oct. 10 crash that wiped out $19 billion in leveraged bets and weakened risk sentiment.
Ether was hovering near $3,850, with solana (SOL, And barely moved in the last 24 hours. The pause comes after a volatile start to October that has so far produced little progress for bulls or bears — and is on track to produce the fewest gains for investors since 2015, despite it being a seasonally bullish month.
The backdrop is as interesting as it is uneventful. The crypto market is in what traders call “growth sell mode,” where each small rally fades as liquidity dwindles and sentiment drifts.
The fear index dropped to 25, a notch above “extreme fear.” Bitcoin has been oscillating between its 50- and 200-day moving averages for nearly two weeks, with each rebound selling off faster than the last.
Even Google couldn’t move the market. The tech giant’s announcement of a “quantum advantage” with its Willow chip — a milestone some say brings the world closer to practical quantum computing — briefly reignited old concerns about Bitcoin’s cryptographic underpinnings.
The idea is simple: Quantum computers could one day decipher the cryptography that keeps Bitcoin secure. In reality, it’s still a long way off, as was discussed in December last year, but it’s enough to remind traders how fragile confidence can be when everything else seems tired.
Yet with uncertain macroeconomic indicators and the Federal Reserve’s Oct. 29 meeting looming, few are betting big one way or the other.
“The market has balanced within this narrow range, and that shows how close we are to a bigger move,” said Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro. “Either the bulls are losing patience or the bears are losing conviction.”
At this point, most traders are simply waiting for something to break – price-wise or narrative-wise. Even Google’s so-called quantum leap was not enough to achieve this.
For a space built on speculation and narratives, indifference might be the most pessimistic signal of all.
