Bitcoin Dips Below $29.2K After Curve Exploit but Continues Its Range-Bound Ways; ETH, SOL, MATIC Sink

Bitcoin (BTC) was recently trading at $29,165, down 0.7%, over the past 24 hours. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization hovered above $29,300 for most of the weekend but dipped as low as about $23,100 in the hours after stablecoin exchange Curve Finance tweeted that it had suffered an exploit. The breach put more than $100 million in crypto at risk.

Bitcoin has been balancing almost entirely between $29,000 and $29,500 for the past seven days as investors shrug off macroeconomic events and continue to seek a catalyst. Still, Joe DiPasquale, the CEO of crypto fund manager BitBull Capital, noted a “sustained sentiment shift” to the upside in markets.

“Notably, now that the Fed’s interest rate hike is also priced, the fact that Bitcoin and ETH have both maintained their price levels, should give bulls additional confidence,” DiPasquale wrote.

He added that “increased, speculative price actions around coins on the Base network,” underlined this bullish trend.

Curve’s CRV token plummeted more than 19% at one point on Sunday and was more recently off 15.7% to trade at 63 cents.

Ether (ETH), the second largest crypto by market cap, and most other major cryptos in value according to CoinDesk Indices, followed a similar pattern, sinking after the Curve hack, which added to a long list of industry woes over the past two years.

ETH was recently changing hands at $1,857, off 1.2% from Sunday.  Ether has been narrowly range-bound over the past seven days between $1,840 and $1,890. SOL and MATIC, the token of the smart contracts Solana and Polygon platforms, were recently off 4.5% and 4.2%, respectively, over the past 24 hours. Popular memecoin DOGE off 3.7%, respectively. The broader CoinDesk Market Index (CMI) recently moved 0.9% lower for the day.

U.S. jobs data will hold the economic spotlight in the coming week with investors looking for signs of a slowing employment market that the last vestiges of a two-year bout of torrid inflation was under control and that the Federal Reserve will be able to halt its diet of interest rate hikes that have often weighed on asset markets.

BitBull’s DiPasquale is not expecting “an overnight surge in the market,” and sees 2024’s halving as the next major price spur. “Until then, bulls will do well to accumulate when opportune and bears may want to practice vigilant risk management,” he wrote.