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The cryptocurrency is trading near $47,000 at press time, representing a 4.4% drop on the day, CoinDesk 20 data show. The decline has reversed Wednesday’s 2.7% gain and exposed the widely tracked 200-day moving average (MA) line located at $46,040

“What we are seeing is typical pre-expiry price volatility,” said Phillipe Bekhazi, CEO at XBTO Group. “[The] market generally rebounds after monthly settlement.”

A total of 42,500 option contracts worth roughly $2 billion are set to expire on Friday, according to data provided by Skew. The dominant crypto options exchange Deribit will settle the majority of open interest at 8:00 UTC.

Data since January show bitcoin (BTC, -1.38%) tends to move toward the “max pain” point in the lead up to the expiration and sees a solid directional move in days after settlement. In traditional market theory, this behavior results from option sellers, mostly institutions, manipulating the spot market to push prices closer to the strike price at which the highest number of open options contracts expire worthlessly, yielding maximum losses – or maximum pain – for option buyers and minimizing losses for the sellers.

History seems to be repeating itself, as the max pain point for Friday’s monthly expiration is $44,000, according to Deribit. The options market has also flipped bearish for the short term, with the one-week put-call skew reporting positive values at press time. That’s a sign of short-term puts, or bearish bets, drawing higher demand than calls. The one-month skew is neutral, while the three- and six-month skews are still trading negative, indicating a long-term bullish bias.

A continued inflow of BTC onto crypto exchanges could also bring some price volatility. Blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant data show Huobi exchange received 23,256 BTC at 06:08 UTC today.

“It’s an actual deposit from a user,” CryptoQuant CEO Ki-Young Ju told CoinDesk in a Telegram chat. Users typically transfer bitcoins to exchanges when they plan to liquidate holdings or sell coins to fund derivatives and alternative cryptocurrency trading, leading to increased price turbulence.

“Bitcoin reserve across all exchanges is increasing lately, and this could affect the market in the short term,” Ju said. “These Bitcoins could be sold, used as collateral for derivative trading, or used for altcoin trading. Either way, it increases the market volatility.”

From a technical analysis standpoint, the immediate bias has flipped bearish owing to the cryptocurrency’s failure to keep gains above $50,000 earlier this week.

“Both bitcoin and ether (ETH, -1.39%) confirmed short-term counter-trend ‘sell’ signals per the DeMARK Indicators, which have been fairly timely in the past as indicators of short-term inflections,” Katie Stockton, founder, and managing partner of Fairlead Strategies, said in an email. “The message is for another 1-2 weeks of sideways-to-lower price action.”

Stockton added that while the intermediate-term momentum remains positive, some risk management may be necessary for the very near term, given the 50-day MA at $39,652 is the initial support. Meanwhile, XBTO’s Bekhazi mentioned $46,800 as key support.

Also read: Bitcoin Miners Hold Onto Rigs, Betting the Bull Run Will Continue 

“I know there is supply available,” said Vincent Vuong, director of sales and procurement at bitcoin mining and hosting company Compass Mining. “I talked to a lot of people. They all have thousands of units but nobody is willing to sell them.”

China’s crackdown on crypto mining sent mining rigs’ prices plummeting a few months ago, but the machines are now trading at a premium thanks to bitcoin’s recent bull run. 

In recent weeks, bitcoin has seen some of its largest gains this year, boosting sellers’ confidence in the machines’ prices in the future. 

Mining machines manufacturers like Bitmain and MicroBT allow their clients to pre-order the rigs and hold futures contracts for batches of machines that will be delivered on a predetermined future date. This practice has become more common as the coronavirus pandemic has slowed global logistics and created a crunch on the supply chain for materials to make the machines. 

The practice has come about also because major chip suppliers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. have relatively small quotas for specified chips for bitcoin mining machine makers.  

Both futures and spot markets for mining machines have already seen a significant increase in mining machines’ prices, signaling miners’ bullish expectations on the largest cryptocurrency’s price, according to industry pros. 

Thus, there has been a dynamic futures contracts market for miners, brokers and speculators, who are making trades based on bitcoin prices and other factors that affect machines’ profitability like electricity costs.  

“One of the major bellwethers for bitcoin’s market is the mining machines’ futures market,” said Franky Hu, chief business development officer at MyRig, a miner hosting services provider based in Russia. “When futures contracts of mining rigs are trading at a much higher price than current price, miners are betting on higher bitcoin prices, which leads to a wider profit margin.”    

Rig prices across the secondary spot market appear to have bottomed out in July and have risen for three weeks in a row. The prices for different mining machines saw a 7.5% increase on average last week, the biggest jump since the rebound, according to the Rig Price Index by Seattle-based mining company Luxor. 

The growth rate of the price of rigs in the secondary market indicates buyers are pricing machines based on a bullish outlook for a bitcoin price that can lead to wider profit margins, Ethan Vera, Luxor’s chief operating officer, said.  

The price of the rigs is being set not only by how much the machinery itself is worth, but also by the expected profitability driven by market sentiment regarding the price of the bitcoin those machines could mine. 

“Over the past three weeks, the rig prices have outrun bitcoin price; it shows that it is not purely based on current economics, but also future sentiment,” Vera said.

Early this week, bitcoin recrossed above $50,000 and has been logging gains for five consecutive weeks, which marks its longest weekly winning streak in nine months. 

“When bitcoin price goes up, nobody has the incentive to sell their machines,” Vuong said. “There is a lot of upside potential.” 

Miners and brokers raked in big profits during bitcoin’s bull runs in the past by making well-timed trades, Vuong said. 

For example, the S9, which is one of the older models of mining machines made by Bitmain, was selling for up to $20, before last year’s bull run. However, at the peak of the rally in late 2020, the same machines were selling for $600 to $700, which is 30 to 35 times higher, Vuong said. 

Trading mining rigs has become more strategic over time. Vuong even suggested that someone trading hardware might have been able to make more money than actually buying and holding bitcoin itself.  

Even in the short-term bearish market, some sellers are opting to wait it out by running their mining machines on a hosting site. Doing so can generate daily profits, which can buy them more time while they wait for the bear market to pass, Vuong said. 

What’s more, the sellers are generally able to realize a higher sale price on machines that are already plugged in. “The machine on the shelf is more valuable than those in the warehouse,” he said. 

Chinese miners were enthusiastic resellers in the first few months after the ban, resulting in a glut of secondhand machines in the market, according to Vera. 

The State Council of China called for a sweeping ban on crypto mining and trading in May, creating a massive market of used mining machines, Vera said.

Some of the large Chinese miners had been running mega mining farms, generating over 1 exahashes per second (EH/s) before the crackdown. After, around one million mining rigs went offline in China, according to Vera’s estimates.  Exahashes is a measure of the computational power of a mining machine, which is a heavy-duty computer used to try to solve math problems in order to gain newly minted bitcoin. The computers also process bitcoin transactions.

“The ban forced them to unplug all their machines, which means they could lose millions of dollars everyday,” Vera said. 

But now, miners are thinking longer term. “Miners are overall more patient in China, less frantic than they once were when the ban happened,” Vera said. 

“They have come to terms with the fact that they are going to lose out on profitability this year and [are spending] more time thinking about how they are going to run their future operations.” 

The massive market of used rigs has a price arbitrage mechanism that allows brokers to factor bitcoin’s price into how much a machine might sell for.

At 11 every morning in Beijing, brokers in China update prices for mining machines and relay that information to brokers in North America. That daily update enables miners and brokers in China to factor bitcoin’s price into their rigs’ prices in a matter of hours. 

“Whenever the bitcoin price goes up, the machine prices would increase in the next couple of hours,” Vuong said. “No seller would honor the deal with buyers for more than a day unless the two parties have a really good relationship.” 

While it could take just a few hours to raise rigs’ prices, it generally takes two to three weeks for them to fall after bitcoin prices drop, giving sellers enough time to adjust their prices. 

“Once you saw bitcoin price dropping to around $30,000, it took more than three to four weeks before we started to see the hardware prices start to drop,” Vuong said.  

Yet the risk for holding mining rigs still exists because the machines depreciate in value as they tend to deteriorate over time, and miners might lose money sitting on a pile of machines in a warehouse if they cannot find places to operate them. 

“Bitcoin mining now requires a lot more strategies,” Vuong said. “There are multiple ways to play it, and it is going to become less about who has the money to spend and more about who has the best future planning and strategy.”

Another reason that Chinese miners have stopped selling mining machines is because some of them are able to plug their bitcoin mining rigs back online and mine bitcoins in certain jurisdictions in China, according to two major Chinese bitcoin mining companies that declined to disclose their identities because of China’s laws and regulations on crypto mining.

“Given how much hashrate has come back online and most miners outside China are still building their mining facilities, we think some miners in China with at least a few hundred megawatts of capacity combined have started mining again,” one source said. 

In response to the increase in global hashrate as more miners come back online, bitcoin’s mining difficulty rose by 13% today in the latest biweekly adjustment. This latest adjustment, the largest since July, marks the third consecutive upward adjustment.

On the other hand, another source said some Chinese miners might have to shelve or sell their mining machines after the rainy season in South China comes to an end. 

According to the data from Arcane Research, the bitcoin hashrate 14-day moving average has held above 100 EH/s. That is a 25% increase from the lows.    

But large public Chinese mining companies migrating out of China such as BIT Mining are not recovering at nearly the same rate, and miners outside China are still building new facilities to add more hashrate. 

BIT Mining has been deploying thousands of its mining machines to new facilities in central Asia and North America, but only a few hundred petahashes/per second (PH/s) of the company’s hashrate has been recovered, compared with its theoretical maximum hashrate of 1425.3 PH/s (1.42 EH/s). 

Private and small-sized bitcoin miners, on the other hand, are beginning to see a more positive future with China’s regulations on crypto mining. 

“Right now, some miners in China think that some hashrate will be plugged back in China, especially with the use of Ethereum GPU (graphics processing unit) mining machines not being banned in the country anymore,” Vera said. “They think that maybe a few hundred megawatts can come back online by the end of this year in China and that has increased the sentiment of Chinese brokers and miners.” 

There may be more increases in rigs prices in the long term as new institutional players such as family offices are entering the bitcoin mining industry, according to Hu of MyRig. 

From power producers to real estate to family offices, a variety of non-crypto companies are eyeing bitcoin mining to diversify their revenue streams. “Every company is becoming a mining company nowadays,” Hu said. 

“I know there is supply available,” said Vincent Vuong, director of sales and procurement at bitcoin mining and hosting company Compass Mining. “I talked to a lot of people. They all have thousands of units but nobody is willing to sell them.”

China’s crackdown on crypto mining sent mining rigs’ prices plummeting a few months ago, but the machines are now trading at a premium thanks to bitcoin’s recent bull run. 

In recent weeks, bitcoin has seen some of its largest gains this year, boosting sellers’ confidence in the machines’ prices in the future. 

Mining machines manufacturers like Bitmain and MicroBT allow their clients to pre-order the rigs and hold futures contracts for batches of machines that will be delivered on a predetermined future date. This practice has become more common as the coronavirus pandemic has slowed global logistics and created a crunch on the supply chain for materials to make the machines. 

The practice has come about also because major chip suppliers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. have relatively small quotas for specified chips for bitcoin mining machine makers.  

Both futures and spot markets for mining machines have already seen a significant increase in mining machines’ prices, signaling miners’ bullish expectations on the largest cryptocurrency’s price, according to industry pros. 

Thus, there has been a dynamic futures contracts market for miners, brokers and speculators, who are making trades based on bitcoin prices and other factors that affect machines’ profitability like electricity costs.  

“One of the major bellwethers for bitcoin’s market is the mining machines’ futures market,” said Franky Hu, chief business development officer at MyRig, a miner hosting services provider based in Russia. “When futures contracts of mining rigs are trading at a much higher price than current price, miners are betting on higher bitcoin prices, which leads to a wider profit margin.”    

Rig prices across the secondary spot market appear to have bottomed out in July and have risen for three weeks in a row. The prices for different mining machines saw a 7.5% increase on average last week, the biggest jump since the rebound, according to the Rig Price Index by Seattle-based mining company Luxor. 

The growth rate of the price of rigs in the secondary market indicates buyers are pricing machines based on a bullish outlook for a bitcoin price that can lead to wider profit margins, Ethan Vera, Luxor’s chief operating officer, said.  

The price of the rigs is being set not only by how much the machinery itself is worth, but also by the expected profitability driven by market sentiment regarding the price of the bitcoin those machines could mine. 

“Over the past three weeks, the rig prices have outrun bitcoin price; it shows that it is not purely based on current economics, but also future sentiment,” Vera said.

Early this week, bitcoin recrossed above $50,000 and has been logging gains for five consecutive weeks, which marks its longest weekly winning streak in nine months. 

“When bitcoin price goes up, nobody has the incentive to sell their machines,” Vuong said. “There is a lot of upside potential.” 

Miners and brokers raked in big profits during bitcoin’s bull runs in the past by making well-timed trades, Vuong said. 

For example, the S9, which is one of the older models of mining machines made by Bitmain, was selling for up to $20, before last year’s bull run. However, at the peak of the rally in late 2020, the same machines were selling for $600 to $700, which is 30 to 35 times higher, Vuong said. 

Trading mining rigs has become more strategic over time. Vuong even suggested that someone trading hardware might have been able to make more money than actually buying and holding bitcoin itself.  

Even in the short-term bearish market, some sellers are opting to wait it out by running their mining machines on a hosting site. Doing so can generate daily profits, which can buy them more time while they wait for the bear market to pass, Vuong said. 

What’s more, the sellers are generally able to realize a higher sale price on machines that are already plugged in. “The machine on the shelf is more valuable than those in the warehouse,” he said. 

Chinese miners were enthusiastic resellers in the first few months after the ban, resulting in a glut of secondhand machines in the market, according to Vera. 

The State Council of China called for a sweeping ban on crypto mining and trading in May, creating a massive market of used mining machines, Vera said.

Some of the large Chinese miners had been running mega mining farms, generating over 1 exahashes per second (EH/s) before the crackdown. After, around one million mining rigs went offline in China, according to Vera’s estimates.  Exahashes is a measure of the computational power of a mining machine, which is a heavy-duty computer used to try to solve math problems in order to gain newly minted bitcoin. The computers also process bitcoin transactions.

“The ban forced them to unplug all their machines, which means they could lose millions of dollars everyday,” Vera said. 

But now, miners are thinking longer term. “Miners are overall more patient in China, less frantic than they once were when the ban happened,” Vera said. 

“They have come to terms with the fact that they are going to lose out on profitability this year and [are spending] more time thinking about how they are going to run their future operations.” 

The massive market of used rigs has a price arbitrage mechanism that allows brokers to factor bitcoin’s price into how much a machine might sell for.

At 11 every morning in Beijing, brokers in China update prices for mining machines and relay that information to brokers in North America. That daily update enables miners and brokers in China to factor bitcoin’s price into their rigs’ prices in a matter of hours. 

“Whenever the bitcoin price goes up, the machine prices would increase in the next couple of hours,” Vuong said. “No seller would honor the deal with buyers for more than a day unless the two parties have a really good relationship.” 

While it could take just a few hours to raise rigs’ prices, it generally takes two to three weeks for them to fall after bitcoin prices drop, giving sellers enough time to adjust their prices. 

“Once you saw bitcoin price dropping to around $30,000, it took more than three to four weeks before we started to see the hardware prices start to drop,” Vuong said.  

Yet the risk for holding mining rigs still exists because the machines depreciate in value as they tend to deteriorate over time, and miners might lose money sitting on a pile of machines in a warehouse if they cannot find places to operate them. 

“Bitcoin mining now requires a lot more strategies,” Vuong said. “There are multiple ways to play it, and it is going to become less about who has the money to spend and more about who has the best future planning and strategy.”

Another reason that Chinese miners have stopped selling mining machines is because some of them are able to plug their bitcoin mining rigs back online and mine bitcoins in certain jurisdictions in China, according to two major Chinese bitcoin mining companies that declined to disclose their identities because of China’s laws and regulations on crypto mining.

“Given how much hashrate has come back online and most miners outside China are still building their mining facilities, we think some miners in China with at least a few hundred megawatts of capacity combined have started mining again,” one source said. 

In response to the increase in global hashrate as more miners come back online, bitcoin’s mining difficulty rose by 13% today in the latest biweekly adjustment. This latest adjustment, the largest since July, marks the third consecutive upward adjustment.

On the other hand, another source said some Chinese miners might have to shelve or sell their mining machines after the rainy season in South China comes to an end. 

According to the data from Arcane Research, the bitcoin hashrate 14-day moving average has held above 100 EH/s. That is a 25% increase from the lows.    

But large public Chinese mining companies migrating out of China such as BIT Mining are not recovering at nearly the same rate, and miners outside China are still building new facilities to add more hashrate. 

BIT Mining has been deploying thousands of its mining machines to new facilities in central Asia and North America, but only a few hundred petahashes/per second (PH/s) of the company’s hashrate has been recovered, compared with its theoretical maximum hashrate of 1425.3 PH/s (1.42 EH/s). 

Private and small-sized bitcoin miners, on the other hand, are beginning to see a more positive future with China’s regulations on crypto mining. 

“Right now, some miners in China think that some hashrate will be plugged back in China, especially with the use of Ethereum GPU (graphics processing unit) mining machines not being banned in the country anymore,” Vera said. “They think that maybe a few hundred megawatts can come back online by the end of this year in China and that has increased the sentiment of Chinese brokers and miners.” 

There may be more increases in rigs prices in the long term as new institutional players such as family offices are entering the bitcoin mining industry, according to Hu of MyRig. 

From power producers to real estate to family offices, a variety of non-crypto companies are eyeing bitcoin mining to diversify their revenue streams. “Every company is becoming a mining company nowadays,” Hu said. 

“I know there is supply available,” said Vincent Vuong, director of sales and procurement at bitcoin mining and hosting company Compass Mining. “I talked to a lot of people. They all have thousands of units but nobody is willing to sell them.”

China’s crackdown on crypto mining sent mining rigs’ prices plummeting a few months ago, but the machines are now trading at a premium thanks to bitcoin’s recent bull run. 

In recent weeks, bitcoin has seen some of its largest gains this year, boosting sellers’ confidence in the machines’ prices in the future. 

Mining machines manufacturers like Bitmain and MicroBT allow their clients to pre-order the rigs and hold futures contracts for batches of machines that will be delivered on a predetermined future date. This practice has become more common as the coronavirus pandemic has slowed global logistics and created a crunch on the supply chain for materials to make the machines. 

The practice has come about also because major chip suppliers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. have relatively small quotas for specified chips for bitcoin mining machine makers.  

Both futures and spot markets for mining machines have already seen a significant increase in mining machines’ prices, signaling miners’ bullish expectations on the largest cryptocurrency’s price, according to industry pros. 

Thus, there has been a dynamic futures contracts market for miners, brokers and speculators, who are making trades based on bitcoin prices and other factors that affect machines’ profitability like electricity costs.  

“One of the major bellwethers for bitcoin’s market is the mining machines’ futures market,” said Franky Hu, chief business development officer at MyRig, a miner hosting services provider based in Russia. “When futures contracts of mining rigs are trading at a much higher price than current price, miners are betting on higher bitcoin prices, which leads to a wider profit margin.”    

Rig prices across the secondary spot market appear to have bottomed out in July and have risen for three weeks in a row. The prices for different mining machines saw a 7.5% increase on average last week, the biggest jump since the rebound, according to the Rig Price Index by Seattle-based mining company Luxor. 

The growth rate of the price of rigs in the secondary market indicates buyers are pricing machines based on a bullish outlook for a bitcoin price that can lead to wider profit margins, Ethan Vera, Luxor’s chief operating officer, said.  

The price of the rigs is being set not only by how much the machinery itself is worth, but also by the expected profitability driven by market sentiment regarding the price of the bitcoin those machines could mine. 

“Over the past three weeks, the rig prices have outrun bitcoin price; it shows that it is not purely based on current economics, but also future sentiment,” Vera said.

Early this week, bitcoin recrossed above $50,000 and has been logging gains for five consecutive weeks, which marks its longest weekly winning streak in nine months. 

“When bitcoin price goes up, nobody has the incentive to sell their machines,” Vuong said. “There is a lot of upside potential.” 

Miners and brokers raked in big profits during bitcoin’s bull runs in the past by making well-timed trades, Vuong said. 

For example, the S9, which is one of the older models of mining machines made by Bitmain, was selling for up to $20, before last year’s bull run. However, at the peak of the rally in late 2020, the same machines were selling for $600 to $700, which is 30 to 35 times higher, Vuong said. 

Trading mining rigs has become more strategic over time. Vuong even suggested that someone trading hardware might have been able to make more money than actually buying and holding bitcoin itself.  

Even in the short-term bearish market, some sellers are opting to wait it out by running their mining machines on a hosting site. Doing so can generate daily profits, which can buy them more time while they wait for the bear market to pass, Vuong said. 

What’s more, the sellers are generally able to realize a higher sale price on machines that are already plugged in. “The machine on the shelf is more valuable than those in the warehouse,” he said. 

Chinese miners were enthusiastic resellers in the first few months after the ban, resulting in a glut of secondhand machines in the market, according to Vera. 

The State Council of China called for a sweeping ban on crypto mining and trading in May, creating a massive market of used mining machines, Vera said.

Some of the large Chinese miners had been running mega mining farms, generating over 1 exahashes per second (EH/s) before the crackdown. After, around one million mining rigs went offline in China, according to Vera’s estimates.  Exahashes is a measure of the computational power of a mining machine, which is a heavy-duty computer used to try to solve math problems in order to gain newly minted bitcoin. The computers also process bitcoin transactions.

“The ban forced them to unplug all their machines, which means they could lose millions of dollars everyday,” Vera said. 

But now, miners are thinking longer term. “Miners are overall more patient in China, less frantic than they once were when the ban happened,” Vera said. 

“They have come to terms with the fact that they are going to lose out on profitability this year and [are spending] more time thinking about how they are going to run their future operations.” 

The massive market of used rigs has a price arbitrage mechanism that allows brokers to factor bitcoin’s price into how much a machine might sell for.

At 11 every morning in Beijing, brokers in China update prices for mining machines and relay that information to brokers in North America. That daily update enables miners and brokers in China to factor bitcoin’s price into their rigs’ prices in a matter of hours. 

“Whenever the bitcoin price goes up, the machine prices would increase in the next couple of hours,” Vuong said. “No seller would honor the deal with buyers for more than a day unless the two parties have a really good relationship.” 

While it could take just a few hours to raise rigs’ prices, it generally takes two to three weeks for them to fall after bitcoin prices drop, giving sellers enough time to adjust their prices. 

“Once you saw bitcoin price dropping to around $30,000, it took more than three to four weeks before we started to see the hardware prices start to drop,” Vuong said.  

Yet the risk for holding mining rigs still exists because the machines depreciate in value as they tend to deteriorate over time, and miners might lose money sitting on a pile of machines in a warehouse if they cannot find places to operate them. 

“Bitcoin mining now requires a lot more strategies,” Vuong said. “There are multiple ways to play it, and it is going to become less about who has the money to spend and more about who has the best future planning and strategy.”

Another reason that Chinese miners have stopped selling mining machines is because some of them are able to plug their bitcoin mining rigs back online and mine bitcoins in certain jurisdictions in China, according to two major Chinese bitcoin mining companies that declined to disclose their identities because of China’s laws and regulations on crypto mining.

“Given how much hashrate has come back online and most miners outside China are still building their mining facilities, we think some miners in China with at least a few hundred megawatts of capacity combined have started mining again,” one source said. 

In response to the increase in global hashrate as more miners come back online, bitcoin’s mining difficulty rose by 13% today in the latest biweekly adjustment. This latest adjustment, the largest since July, marks the third consecutive upward adjustment.

On the other hand, another source said some Chinese miners might have to shelve or sell their mining machines after the rainy season in South China comes to an end. 

According to the data from Arcane Research, the bitcoin hashrate 14-day moving average has held above 100 EH/s. That is a 25% increase from the lows.    

But large public Chinese mining companies migrating out of China such as BIT Mining are not recovering at nearly the same rate, and miners outside China are still building new facilities to add more hashrate. 

BIT Mining has been deploying thousands of its mining machines to new facilities in central Asia and North America, but only a few hundred petahashes/per second (PH/s) of the company’s hashrate has been recovered, compared with its theoretical maximum hashrate of 1425.3 PH/s (1.42 EH/s). 

Private and small-sized bitcoin miners, on the other hand, are beginning to see a more positive future with China’s regulations on crypto mining. 

“Right now, some miners in China think that some hashrate will be plugged back in China, especially with the use of Ethereum GPU (graphics processing unit) mining machines not being banned in the country anymore,” Vera said. “They think that maybe a few hundred megawatts can come back online by the end of this year in China and that has increased the sentiment of Chinese brokers and miners.” 

There may be more increases in rigs prices in the long term as new institutional players such as family offices are entering the bitcoin mining industry, according to Hu of MyRig. 

From power producers to real estate to family offices, a variety of non-crypto companies are eyeing bitcoin mining to diversify their revenue streams. “Every company is becoming a mining company nowadays,” Hu said. 

ADA was trading at $2.67 at 10:53 UTC, representing a 7.6% drop on a 24-hour basis, and SOL was nursing a 13% loss at $68, according to data source Messari. ADA debuted on Japanese cryptocurrency exchanges today. Earlier this month, Sebastien Guillemot, CTO at dcSpark and a former executive of Cardano-founding entity EMURGO, hailed ADA’s entry to Japan as being similar to a listing on Coinbase, the U.S.-based, Nasdaq-listed crypto exchange and institutions’ preferred avenue to accumulate bitcoin.

XRP (+3.32%), polkadot (DOT, +3.58%) and dogecoin (DOGE, +1.32%) were also down more than 8%. Meanwhile, bitcoin was changing hands at $47,500, down 3.7%, and ether traded 5.5% lower at $3,100, CoinDesk 20 data show. All sub-sectors, including decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens, were flashing red.

According to analytics platform Laevitas, alternative cryptocurrencies were looking ripe for a pullback as holding long positions in many of the coins had become too costly. “Paying over 100% annualized for longs can’t be sustained forever,” Laevitas tweeted, adding that the price drop looks like a healthy correction.

Some of the coins like ADA and SOL looked overbought, having recently rallied to record highs and outperformed bitcoin by a significant margin. For instance, ADA had rallied 187% and SOL 272% in the past four weeks, more than twice as much as bitcoin’s 70%.

“The duo of Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL) has seen a meteoric rise in price and valuation lately, with both printing new all-time highs at $2.97 and $81.81 respectively,” Pavel Shkitin, CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Nominex.io said. “Despite the superiority in both tokens’ technologies, the surge in the past days is somewhat unprecedented, and the current reversal is an expected reaction.”

James Wo, founder, and CEO of the Digital Finance Group said it is normal for investors to reduce exposure and take profits to enter at a lower price since we’ve seen the market signal that a short-term top was reached.

Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency by market value, looked due for a pause on Wednesday, with exchanges seeing an increased inflow of coins amid renewed selling by whales.

Similar dynamics were observable in Ethereum’s ether token. According to blockchain analytics firm Santiment, exchanges received 779,880 ETH on Monday, the most since June 21st. “Judging by on-chain data, it might be a whale possibly looking to take some profits,” Santiment said in a research note published Tuesday.

Analysts remain confident of major cryptocurrencies’ long-term prospects. Laurent Kssis, managing director of exchange-traded products at 21Shares, foresees a return of institutional demand to the bitcoin market after Friday’s Jackson Hole Symposium.

Nominex.io’s Shkitin expects the so-called Ethereum killers ADA and SOL to regain their upward trajectory. “With what Cardano, through its forthcoming Alonzo upgrade, is set to usher in and Solana’s blooming fundamentals, these price drops are at best temporary, and a reversal is imminent in the near to mid-term,” he said.

Also read: Cardano Alonzo Hard Fork: What You Need to Know

ADA was trading at $2.67 at 10:53 UTC, representing a 7.6% drop on a 24-hour basis, and SOL was nursing a 13% loss at $68, according to data source Messari. ADA debuted on Japanese cryptocurrency exchanges today. Earlier this month, Sebastien Guillemot, CTO at dcSpark and a former executive of Cardano-founding entity EMURGO, hailed ADA’s entry to Japan as being similar to a listing on Coinbase, the U.S.-based, Nasdaq-listed crypto exchange and institutions’ preferred avenue to accumulate bitcoin.

XRP (+0.92%), polkadot (DOT, +3.22%) and dogecoin (DOGE, +0.75%) were also down more than 8%. Meanwhile, bitcoin was changing hands at $47,500, down 3.7%, and ether traded 5.5% lower at $3,100, CoinDesk 20 data show. All sub-sectors, including decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens, were flashing red.

According to analytics platform Laevitas, alternative cryptocurrencies were looking ripe for a pullback as holding long positions in many of the coins had become too costly. “Paying over 100% annualized for longs can’t be sustained forever,” Laevitas tweeted, adding that the price drop looks like a healthy correction.

Some of the coins like ADA and SOL looked overbought, having recently rallied to record highs and outperformed bitcoin by a significant margin. For instance, ADA had rallied 187% and SOL 272% in the past four weeks, more than twice as much as bitcoin’s 70%.

“The duo of Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL) has seen a meteoric rise in price and valuation lately, with both printing new all-time highs at $2.97 and $81.81 respectively,” Pavel Shkitin, CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Nominex.io said. “Despite the superiority in both tokens’ technologies, the surge in the past days is somewhat unprecedented, and the current reversal is an expected reaction.”

James Wo, founder, and CEO of the Digital Finance Group said it is normal for investors to reduce exposure and take profits to enter at a lower price since we’ve seen the market signal that a short-term top was reached.

Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency by market value, looked due for a pause on Wednesday, with exchanges seeing an increased inflow of coins amid renewed selling by whales.

Similar dynamics were observable in Ethereum’s ether token. According to blockchain analytics firm Santiment, exchanges received 779,880 ETH on Monday, the most since June 21st. “Judging by on-chain data, it might be a whale possibly looking to take some profits,” Santiment said in a research note published Tuesday.

Analysts remain confident of major cryptocurrencies’ long-term prospects. Laurent Kssis, managing director of exchange-traded products at 21Shares, foresees a return of institutional demand to the bitcoin market after Friday’s Jackson Hole Symposium.

Nominex.io’s Shkitin expects the so-called Ethereum killers ADA and SOL to regain their upward trajectory. “With what Cardano, through its forthcoming Alonzo upgrade, is set to usher in and Solana’s blooming fundamentals, these price drops are at best temporary, and a reversal is imminent in the near to mid-term,” he said.

Also read: Cardano Alonzo Hard Fork: What You Need to Know

ADA was trading at $2.67 at 10:53 UTC, representing a 7.6% drop on a 24-hour basis, and SOL was nursing a 13% loss at $68, according to data source Messari. ADA debuted on Japanese cryptocurrency exchanges today. Earlier this month, Sebastien Guillemot, CTO at dcSpark and a former executive of Cardano-founding entity EMURGO, hailed ADA’s entry to Japan as being similar to a listing on Coinbase, the U.S.-based, Nasdaq-listed crypto exchange and institutions’ preferred avenue to accumulate bitcoin.

XRP (-4.41%), polkadot (DOT, -5.71%) and dogecoin (DOGE, -5.32%) were also down more than 8%. Meanwhile, bitcoin was changing hands at $47,500, down 3.7%, and ether traded 5.5% lower at $3,100, CoinDesk 20 data show. All sub-sectors, including decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens, were flashing red.

According to analytics platform Laevitas, alternative cryptocurrencies were looking ripe for a pullback as holding long positions in many of the coins had become too costly. “Paying over 100% annualized for longs can’t be sustained forever,” Laevitas tweeted, adding that the price drop looks like a healthy correction.

Some of the coins like ADA and SOL looked overbought, having recently rallied to record highs and outperformed bitcoin by a significant margin. For instance, ADA had rallied 187% and SOL 272% in the past four weeks, more than twice as much as bitcoin’s 70%.

“The duo of Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL) has seen a meteoric rise in price and valuation lately, with both printing new all-time highs at $2.97 and $81.81 respectively,” Pavel Shkitin, CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Nominex.io said. “Despite the superiority in both tokens’ technologies, the surge in the past days is somewhat unprecedented, and the current reversal is an expected reaction.”

James Wo, founder, and CEO of the Digital Finance Group said it is normal for investors to reduce exposure and take profits to enter at a lower price since we’ve seen the market signal that a short-term top was reached.

Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency by market value, looked due for a pause on Wednesday, with exchanges seeing an increased inflow of coins amid renewed selling by whales.

Similar dynamics were observable in Ethereum’s ether token. According to blockchain analytics firm Santiment, exchanges received 779,880 ETH on Monday, the most since June 21st. “Judging by on-chain data, it might be a whale possibly looking to take some profits,” Santiment said in a research note published Tuesday.

Analysts remain confident of major cryptocurrencies’ long-term prospects. Laurent Kssis, managing director of exchange-traded products at 21Shares, foresees a return of institutional demand to the bitcoin market after Friday’s Jackson Hole Symposium.

Nominex.io’s Shkitin expects the so-called Ethereum killers ADA and SOL to regain their upward trajectory. “With what Cardano, through its forthcoming Alonzo upgrade, is set to usher in and Solana’s blooming fundamentals, these price drops are at best temporary, and a reversal is imminent in the near to mid-term,” he said.

Also read: Cardano Alonzo Hard Fork: What You Need to Know

ADA was trading at $2.67 at 10:53 UTC, representing a 7.6% drop on a 24-hour basis, and SOL was nursing a 13% loss at $68, according to data source Messari. ADA debuted on Japanese cryptocurrency exchanges today. Earlier this month, Sebastien Guillemot, CTO at dcSpark and a former executive of Cardano-founding entity EMURGO, hailed ADA’s entry to Japan as being similar to a listing on Coinbase, the U.S.-based, Nasdaq-listed crypto exchange and institutions’ preferred avenue to accumulate bitcoin.

XRP (-3.36%), polkadot (DOT, -2.35%) and dogecoin (DOGE, -3.82%) were also down more than 8%. Meanwhile, bitcoin was changing hands at $47,500, down 3.7%, and ether traded 5.5% lower at $3,100, CoinDesk 20 data show. All sub-sectors, including decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens, were flashing red.

According to analytics platform Laevitas, alternative cryptocurrencies were looking ripe for a pullback as holding long positions in many of the coins had become too costly. “Paying over 100% annualized for longs can’t be sustained forever,” Laevitas tweeted, adding that the price drop looks like a healthy correction.

Some of the coins like ADA and SOL looked overbought, having recently rallied to record highs and outperformed bitcoin by a significant margin. For instance, ADA had rallied 187% and SOL 272% in the past four weeks, more than twice as much as bitcoin’s 70%.

“The duo of Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL) has seen a meteoric rise in price and valuation lately, with both printing new all-time highs at $2.97 and $81.81 respectively,” Pavel Shkitin, CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Nominex.io said. “Despite the superiority in both tokens’ technologies, the surge in the past days is somewhat unprecedented, and the current reversal is an expected reaction.”

James Wo, founder, and CEO of the Digital Finance Group said it is normal for investors to reduce exposure and take profits to enter at a lower price since we’ve seen the market signal that a short-term top was reached.

Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency by market value, looked due for a pause on Wednesday, with exchanges seeing an increased inflow of coins amid renewed selling by whales.

Similar dynamics were observable in Ethereum’s ether token. According to blockchain analytics firm Santiment, exchanges received 779,880 ETH on Monday, the most since June 21st. “Judging by on-chain data, it might be a whale possibly looking to take some profits,” Santiment said in a research note published Tuesday.

Analysts remain confident of major cryptocurrencies’ long-term prospects. Laurent Kssis, managing director of exchange-traded products at 21Shares, foresees a return of institutional demand to the bitcoin market after Friday’s Jackson Hole Symposium.

Nominex.io’s Shkitin expects the so-called Ethereum killers ADA and SOL to regain their upward trajectory. “With what Cardano, through its forthcoming Alonzo upgrade, is set to usher in and Solana’s blooming fundamentals, these price drops are at best temporary, and a reversal is imminent in the near to mid-term,” he said.

Also read: Cardano Alonzo Hard Fork: What You Need to Know

Some analysts expressed caution after bitcoin failed to keep pushing higher above the $50,000 resistance level.

“Our bullishness comes with some moderation, and we don’t expect more exponential upside breaks like what we saw at the end of 2020 into 2021,” crypto trading firm QCP Capital wrote in a Telegram chat. 

Cryptocurrencies:

Traditional markets:

“The fear is gone for now, and the market is optimistic,” Arcane Research wrote in a Tuesday newsletter. Bitcoin’s rise towards $50,000 pushed the crypto “Fear and Greed” index to “extreme greed” territory this week, before the more recent decline. 

Arcane noted that other indicators suggest neutral sentiment. For example, relatively low funding rates in bitcoin’s futures market indicates less exuberance among investors. 

“Funding rates and future premiums in both BTC and ETH actually continue to be relatively low and muted,” QCP Capital wrote in a Telegram chat. “This means most of the rally has been driven by demand in physical spot rather than from leveraged speculators.”

“A euphoric market could indicate a local top and a signal to traders who want to take some chips off the table,” Arcane wrote.

Bitcoin’s “spent output profit ratio” (SOPR) – the price at the time the cryptocurrency was sold divided by the price at the time it was originally bought – turned positive after a steep decline since January. The uplift in SOPR could be a sign that the “capitulation period has ended and the market is back on solid ground,” Coin Metrics wrote in a Tuesday newsletter.

SOPR is a proxy for realized profit and loss for all coins moved on the blockchain. The SOPR was negative for most of June, which meant that investors were selling bitcoin at a loss. Now positive, the SOPR is currently suggesting that, in aggregate, holders are sitting on profits relative to their cost basis.

Blockchain data has not responded to bitcoin’s price rally (yet), which could point to limited upside. Transaction counts are at historically low levels, similar to previous periods when investor interest in bitcoin waned, according to Glassnode. 

“The Bitcoin network is setting around $18.8 billion in daily volume,” Glassnode wrote in a blog post. “This is 37% lower than at the 2017 bubble peak, and a whopping 57.6% below the peak set during the May capitulation event.”

Bitcoin’s hashrate has been recovering from a local bottom in late June and early July, after China started cracking down on crypto mining in the country, according to Coin Metrics. 

The seven-day moving average of bitcoin’s hashrate stood at 127.5 exahashes per second on Monday, August 23, up from a local bottom of 84.3 exahashes per second on July 2, according to data from Glassnode. 

“The recovering hashrate is a signal that some mining operations are starting to come back online in new locations and that the worst of the crackdown is likely over,” Coin Metrics wrote in the notes. 

Most digital assets on CoinDesk 20 ended lower on Tuesday. In fact, everything was in the red except for dollar-linked stablecoins.

Notable losers of 21:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET):

polkadot (DOT) -8.16%

the graph (GRT) -7.13%

eos (EOS) -6.91%

The seven-day average real BTC trading volume is still around $5 billion, less than half of what the market witnessed the last time bitcoin was at $50,000, Arcane Research analysts wrote Tuesday in a report. 

If trading volume continues to be relatively flat and bitcoin prices push higher, the market could become exhausted and the rally won’t be sustainable, the analysts said.

“We have not seen the desired spike in volume with this latest move higher for the bitcoin price, which could indicate that we’re not ready for $50,000 just yet,” the report stated. 

“This means there’s not a lot of interest from traders to get engaged,” said Patrick Heusser, head of trading at Crypto Finance. “This is typical range-trading behavior.

“Either we break out of the range or some news will be the catalyst for a larger move,” he said. 

Matthew Blom, global head of trading at digital-asset firm Eqonex, said that “as lovely, timely and wonderful as this rally has been, the headwinds of the Fed, $50,000, and the muted effect of PayPal announcing their entrance into the U.K. market, could put it on ice.” 

Bitcoin blockchain activity also has remained anemic as the bitcoin price recovered, Arcane Research analysts noted, saying that “the number of active addresses is still far from the top levels seen during the hype of early 2021.”

That’s despite signs that market sentiment has climbed along with the price: “Extreme greed is back, the fear is gone for now, and the market is optimistic,” Arcane Research analysts wrote. In July, the index was registering a reading of “extreme fear.”