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After an epic battle for control at the beginning of January, Bitcoin bulls managed to topple bears this week, with the price soaring past $18,000 on Dec 12 for the first time since mid-December.
At press time, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by traded volume was exchanging hands at $18,687 after a 7% increase in the past 24 hours. Earlier in the day, the price rose as high as $18,780, marking the sixth consecutive day for the asset to print a bullish candle.
For most of the day, the crypto market remained green, with Ethereum adding roughly 6% to tap a two-month high of $1,400. On the other hand, Cardano, Solana and XRP traded mostly sideways, adding about 5% each.
Avalanche was the biggest gainer among the top 20 coins by market capitalization, adding 21.11% in the past day. On Wednesday, the network partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to scale blockchain services for businesses and governments. Overall, the global crypto market cap rose by 4.78% to tap $900 Billion, marking the largest single-day push this year.
Bitcoin’s impressive ascent over the past seven days has been attributed to a return of big social dominance spikes as the asset’s plunge offers extremely discounted prices. After being kept at bay by poor market liquidity towards the end of 2022, onchain data shows that whales with 1,000 to 10,000 BTC added around 20,000 BTC to their holdings between Jan 5 and Jan 11.
 
 
Today, Glassnode noted that over 13% of the circulating supply had returned to profit, making it a significant milestone since mid-2022.
“As Bitcoin rallies to $18.2k, over 13% of the Circulating Supply has returned to profit. The observed sharp move upwards in this metric helps to confirm that a large volume of BTC was acquired between $16.5k and $18.2k,” wrote Glassnode sharing the chart below.
On the other hand, observers have attributed Ethereum’s recovery to the impending Shanghai upgrade. The upgrade, due in March, will allow users to unstake and withdraw their Ether which has been locked into the Beacon chain since December 2020. Furthermore, the upgrade is expected to reduce centralization on Ethereum, allowing more projects to onboard and, as a result, liquidity to flow into the ecosystem.
That said, the markets seem to be pricing that in advance. 3,000 new shark addresses (holding 100 to 10,000 $ETH) have shown up on the network over the past week bringing the total number of shark addresses since Feb 2021 to 48,556.
At the same time, onchain data showed that shark and whale addresses holding different cryptocurrencies have been accumulating Tether, the top stablecoin by market cap, as they prepare for the next bull run. According to Santiment, “There are now 21,459 addresses that hold $100k or more USDT, just 1% from a new all-time high.”
