Bitcoin Wobbles, Then Regains Its Balance Above $29.2K; ETH, DOGE, MATIC Fall

Bitcoin ticked down slightly on Friday morning in Asia after a Nikkei report that the Bank of Japan was mulling a change to its yield curve control policy, but then recovered lost ground quickly to trade at $29,210, off about 0.15% over the past four hours and down 1% from Thursday, same time.

BTC has spent the past 24 hours largely unstirred by dueling 25 basis point interest rate hikes – both expected – first by the the U.S. central bank and then the European Central Bank (ECB). Its resilience continues a recent trend of brushing off macroeconomic events that previously weighed on cryptos.

Ether has been following a similar path and was recently changing hands at $1,856, a 0.6% drop-off during the past four hours and down 1% from the previous day, same time.

Brent Xu, chief executive officer and co-founder of Web3 bond-market platform Umee, sees the current stasis amid rising rates as a sign of strength but also expects a continuation. “The argument that we’ve entered a new bull cycle strikes me as a flawed interpretation of current market dynamics,” Xu wrote in an email to CoinDesk. “We’re likely going to be stuck in a range-bound pattern for a prolonged prolonged period of time.”

Other major cryptos by market cap were in negative territory. Popular memecoin DOGE and MATIC, the token of smart contracts platform Polygon, were recently off 2% and 2.2%, respectively. Stellar Lumens’ XLM token, which rose by double-digits the previous day, was up a more modest 1.8%.

The CoinDesk Market Index, a measure of crypto markets performance, was recently down 0.5%.

Major U.S. equity indexes fell with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite and S&P 500 off 0.5% and 0.6%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average’s also declined 0.7% to snap its longest winning streak in more than three decades.

Umee’s Xu noted that trading volumes are “relatively low” and retail investors are not flocking to the space. “Traders and investors probably need to be preparing for several months of boring market actions, with periods of short-lived rallies that revert back to something of a mean,” he wrote, adding that he does not expect a dramatic rally until next year’s halving, which could coincide with rate cuts. “Cuts could If there’s some breakage that takes place, such as a credit crunch or acceleration of the banking crisis.”