Bitcoin has started the week on a more subdued note after coming close to its all-time high at the end of last week, seemingly not helped by Donald Trump reportedly declaring he “would be the crypto president” at an election fundraising event.
The king cryptocurrency looked like it might challenge its $73,000 all-time high on Friday morning, topping $71K and coming close to $72K in the run-up to the release of US non-farm payrolls report, when buying appetite wore out.
Neil Roarty, analyst at investment platform Stocklytics, said the rise was driven by its strongest ETF performance since investment products were launched in January.
But he said the "mood quickly soured" with a drop below $70K by the time the weekend had started, which he linked to strong US jobs data at the end of the week, which is expected to keep the Federal Reserve from cutting interest rates in the short-term.
"Institutional investors joining the Bitcoin party via ETFs may be raising the floor, but all eyes remain on the Fed for the rate cuts that could help it smash through the ceiling."
Over the past 24 hours BTC has traded between $69.38K and $69.80.
The average monthly change in demand for BTC from retail investors with transactions under $10K has dropped to -17%, according to CoinPedia.
Elsewhere, one of the few large-cap cryptos in the green at the start of the week was Cardano, after founder Charles Hoskinson shared some thoughts on social media about what he feels is "a profound disconnect between reality and opinion" from cryptocurrency influencers and media.
"We are on the verge of the most significant hard fork in the history of the project," he said, referring to a radical update of a blockchain's protocol.
He also noted that many community DApps [decentralised applications] are "growing rapidly" and cardano is "leading the industry in scaling R&D" and pointing to technologies like its Hydra scaling solution, partnerchains connected to cardano, the Midnight sidechain and Prism, its decentralised identity solution providing secure, verifiable digital identities.
"It's becoming impossible to keep up with, and it has much good news coming in just the next six months," Hoskinson said. "Then I look at the cryptomedia, and the headlines are 'Will Cardano die?' It's beyond pathetic and just reflects on the low quality and low effort they put into our ecosystem.
"Cardano is here to stay, and it's a juggernaut that will drag this industry kicking and screaming if it has to towards solving the real-world economic, political, and social issues we all face."
Cardano was up 0.8% over 24 hours at $0.4449, down 4% over a month and up 77% over 12 months.
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