Bitcoin is doing that familiar dance just below a big round number, $80,000, locked in by sellers even as new stable coin liquidity, ETF demand and a risky stock market suggest the breakout may be delayed rather than denied.
The leading cryptocurrency briefly climbed above $79,000 during Asian trading hours before recently falling back below $78,000. Over the past 24 hours, bitcoin has lost around 0.4%. Ether (ETH) is down 0.6%, XRP (XRP) is down 0.8%, and Solana’s SOL is down over 1%. Broader market benchmarks, including the CoinDesk Memecoin Index and the Smart Contract Platform Select Capped Index, were also under pressure, falling more than 1% each.
According to Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro, the $80,000 level is a short-term ceiling due to the concentration of sell orders.
“Bitcoin approached the $80,000 mark for the second time in the past few days, but has since seen significant downward momentum. As this round number approaches, a buildup of sell orders is preventing the coin from advancing further,” he said in an email.
Nonetheless, Kuptsikevich maintained that the pullback appears temporary and consistent with a broader uptrend that began in late March.
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On-chain and ETF data support this view. Crypto exchange Binance has seen a net inflow of around $3.4 billion in stablecoins so far this month, following $3 billion in March, according to CryptoQuant data. This suggests new capital inflows, awaiting an entry point.
“This indicates an influx of new capital waiting to participate in the recovery,” Darkfost, a pseudonymous CryptoQuant analyst, wrote on X.
Institutional demand remains strong. U.S.-listed spot bitcoin ETFs have attracted $2.44 billion of investor money this month, the most since October, when bitcoin hit a record high above $126,000.
But not everything is perfect. Security risks in decentralized finance (DeFi) continue to weigh on trust. On Sunday, the Scallop lending platform based on SUI was exploited, resulting in a loss of approximately 150,000 SUI, or approximately $142,000. Although small, it adds to a growing list of attacks this month, including the massive Drift and KelpDAO exploits.
Combined, DeFi protocols lost approximately $623 million to hacks in April alone, according to Memento Research. Since the beginning, total losses from DeFi-related exploits have climbed to around $7.72 billion, according to data source DeFiLlama. This highlights a persistent structural risk for the sector.
In traditional markets, WTI crude oil prices continue to hover above $90 per barrel, and Brent above $100, with supply remaining tight. The latest prices are well above $70 or less before the start of the war in Iran in late February and threaten to destabilize the global economy with high inflation. Stay vigilant!
Read more: For analysis of current altcoin and derivatives activity, see Crypto Markets Today. For a full list of this week’s events, check out CoinDesk’s “Crypto Week Ahead.”
What is the trend
Signal of the day
The pie chart shows the distribution of total losses incurred in crypto hacks by different attack methods, including private key compromises, phishing exploits, access control issues, and other smart contract vulnerabilities.
Since its inception, the biggest vulnerability has been private key compromises, which represent 40% of the total.
Think of a private key as the master password for your crypto wallet. This is a long, random chain that proves that you control your wallet and own crypto funds in it, allowing you to transact on-chain. The problem, however, is that there is no option to reset the password if you lose the key.
So once the hacker got it, you lost your wallet and funds. This is called private key compromise and the fact that it is the biggest security risk indicates that audits need to focus beyond just smart contracts.
