First Mover Asia: Bitcoin Declines After Reaching a Record High; Ether Also Drops

Good morning, Here’s what’s happening this morning:

• Market moves: Bitcoin soared past $69K before dropping below $65K.

• Technician’s take: Intraday charts are showing initial signs of upside exhaustion.

Catch the latest episodes of CoinDesk TV for insightful interviews with crypto industry leaders and analysis.

Bitcoin faced a pullback below $65,000 in the past 24 hours, a more than 4% decline, after it surpassed $69,000 for the first time in its history during U.S. trading hours on Wednesday. Ether fell to about $4,600, a roughly 3% drop.

The sharp dip came after news that China Evergrande Group failed to pay at least some of its international investors interest payments on bonds the real estate giant issued, raising more concerns about a potential default of the company.

The market perceived the new record price above $69,000 as a reaction to the newly published U.S. Consumer Price Index, which jumped to its highest level in three decades.

Data collected by CoinDesk also shows Wednesday’s rally was not supported by strong trading volume. It was lower on Wednesday than it was on Monday and Tuesday across major centralized exchanges.

As CoinDesk’s David Morris wrote, the deeply indebted Chinese real estate developer has been an important factor to the much broader financial market, crypto included. With its roots in China and worries about Tether’s holdings of Chinese debt, investors may want to watch how Asia’s crypto markets react on Thursday.

Bitcoin was slightly lower, trading around $65,000 at the time of publication, although buyers could hold support above $63,000-$65,000 into Asian trading hours.

Intraday charts are showing initial signs of upside exhaustion, which typically lead to a brief pullback in BTC’s price. For example, the relative strength index (RSI) on the four-hour chart continues to hover near short-term overbought levels.

Still, upside momentum signals are improving on the daily price chart for the first time since Oct. 1, which preceded a price rally from $44,000. This suggests that buyers could remain active on pullbacks.

Two consecutive daily closes above an all-time price high would yield further upside targets, initially toward $86,000.

Australian Housing Industry Association new home sales (October)

8:30 a.m. Hong Kong/Singapore (12:30 a.m. UTC): Australian unemployment rate (October)

3:00 p.m. Hong Kong/Singapore (7 a.m. UTC): UK manufacturing production

“First Mover” hosts spoke with crypto OG and the founder of MakerDAO – a decentralized credit platform on Ethereum that supports the Dai stablecoin – Rune Christensen. He shared his thoughts on the Biden administration’s stablecoin report and the latest decentralization within his organization. Oanda Senior Market Analyst Edward Moya provided markets analysis as bitcoin retreated from an all-time high. Plus, Foundry announced a digital assets staking business and range of services for Institutions supporting 20 blockchains and counting. Foundry CEO Mike Colyer shared details of this launch.