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Will Mercury In Retrograde Bring A Mood Shift In Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is in free fall, just as Mercury goes retrograde for the second time in 2022. The astrological event is blamed for all kinds of miscommunications and technology-related issues. It also appears to have a correlation with major mood shifts and pivot points in Bitcoin price.

With today starting another phase of Mercury in retrograde, let’s take a look at how the planet-related phenomenon might impact price action across crypto.

What Is Mercury In Retrograde? Examining The Astrological Event

Mercury’s period of retrograde motion begins today, and lasts through June 2, 2022. According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, “Mercury Retrograde” is an event that happens three times per year where the planet appears to have “abruptly switched directions and has started to move in reverse across the sky.”

Interestingly, its appearance has been closely correlated with moments when Bitcoin price action has “abruptly switched directions.”

Related Reading | Bitcoin Perfectly Follows Market Cycle Comparison, What Comes Next For Crypto?

The planet, like the Roman messenger god it is named after, supposedly rules communications, which includes technology, transactions, and even contracts such as options, futures, etc. If you notice sudden computer problems over the next three weeks or issues stemming from a mistyped text message, it is Mercury to blame.

But back to Bitcoin. The top cryptocurrency has shown major mood shifts and pivots precisely when the retrograde period rolls around. Take a look.

What will Mercury in retrograde bring? | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
Why Bitcoin Might See A Mood Change And How Math May Involved

Notable moments in Bitcoin price action that coincided with Mercury-driven mayhem include the 2017 bull market peak, the plunge toward the bear market bottom, the breakout just before the bull run in 2020, and even the most recent lows in January 2022 that were only just now taken out a day ahead of going retrograde.

Since not all shifts in investor sentiment are negative when this period rolls around, there is no telling what comes next – only that the period can produce dramatic results. Bears are hoping to push prices down to further lows, while bulls are hoping for targets closer to where Mercury resides in outer space.

Related Reading | Time Vs Price: Why This Bitcoin Correction Was The Most Painful Yet

In terms of why Mercury might have an impact on those of us on Earth, well, it could come down to math. The solar system has interesting and unusual relationships with the Fibonacci sequence – a tool often used in predicting price action in markets.

For example, a year on Earth is 365 days, or nearly a full 360 degrees of a circle. A year on Venus is 225 days, which is roughly the 0.618 Fibonacci ratio of Earth’s cycle. A Mercury year is 87.97 days, and is roughly the 0.236 Fibonacci ratio of the Earth’s cycle.

Could this close relationship with Fibonacci be the reason for Mercury’s extra-powerful impact on us here on Earth?

Mercury goes retrograde as Bitcoin retests the golden ratio. Coincidence? | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com

Follow @TonySpilotroBTC on Twitter or join the TonyTradesBTC Telegram for exclusive daily market insights and technical analysis education. Please note: Content is educational and should not be considered investment advice.

Featured image from iStockPhoto, Charts from TradingView.com

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Bitcoin Long-Term Holders Start Capitulating Amid Panic

On-chain data suggests Bitcoin long-term holders have started to capitulate recently as the sharp price drop causes panic in the market.

Bitcoin CDD Inflow Indicator Jumps Up, Showing Long-Term Holders Have Been Selling

As pointed out by a CryptoQuant post, the recent price drop has pushed long-term holders towards selling their BTC.

“Coin days” are the number of days a Bitcoin has remained dormant for. An example: if 1 BTC doesn’t move for 5 days, it accumulates 5 coin days.

When such a coin would be transferred or moved, its coin days would be “destroyed” as the number will reset back to zero.

Related Reading | Bitcoin Slips Below $33k As Exchange Inflows Reach Highest Value Since July 2021

The “coin days destroyed” (CDD) metric naturally measures how many of these coin days are being destroyed in the entire market at any given time.

A modification of this indicator, called the “Bitcoin exchange inflow CDD,” tells us about only those coin days that were destroyed by a transfer to exchanges.

A high value of the inflow CDD generally suggests that long-term holders (who accumulate a large number of coin days) are moving their coins to exchanges.

Investors usually transfer their Bitcoin to exchanges for selling purposes, so LTHs transferring a large number of their coins can be bearish for the price of the crypto.

Now, here is a chart that shows the trend in the BTC inflow CDD over the past month:

The value of the indicator seems to have spiked up recently | Source: CryptoQuant

As you can see in the above graph, the Bitcoin exchange inflow CDD has observed some high values over the last few days.

This shows that long-term holders have been selling amid the recent panic in the market due to the price drop from $38k to below $30k.

Related Reading | Terra Beats Tesla As Second-Largest Corporate Bitcoin Holder After $1.5B Purchase

The especially large spikes in the last two days suggest LTHs may have started to go through a phase of capitulation.

Since LTHs usually make up the Bitcoin cohort that is the least likely to sell, capitulation from them is a negative sign for the price of the coin.

BTC Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price floats around $31.6k, down 18% in the last seven days. Over the past month, the crypto has lost 26% in value.

The below chart shows the trend in the price of the coin over the last five days.

Looks like the price of BTC has observed a plunge in the past few days | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Bitcoin’s drop has continued today as the crypto briefly touched below $30k for the first time since July of last year, before rebounding back to the current level.

Featured image from Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, CryptoQuant.com

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Polkadot’s 16th Parachain Slot Secured in Crowdloan Round

On the 6th of May, Polkadot’s most recent auction round came to an end, generating over $13.8 million and bringing a new platform to the system. The winner of this auction, Polkadex, put up 973,324 DOTs across over 6000 community member donations, demonstrating the incredible community push that was behind this win.

Polkadot is an interoperable blockchain ecosystem that offers high levels of security, user-driven governance, high energy efficiency, and is readily built for rapid scalability. Part of this scalability comes through its interoperable parachains, with many different blockchain systems linking into the central chain.

By winning the most recent parachain slot auction, Polkadex has become the 16th chain to become embedded into Polkadot. Polkadex is built on substrate, providing a user-friendly decentralized order-book exchange where users can participate in high-frequency trading and other DeFi functions.

The COO of Polkadex, Deepansh Singh, comments on their parachain win, suggesting that “Thanks to the Polkadex parachain, we will be able to bridge assets with the Dotsama ecosystem and now users will be able to trade Polkadot ecosystem tokens from across the whole spectrum of parachians,” signaling the core interoperability that Polkadot offers.

Equally, he continued by marking this as a monumental event for the ecosystem itself, “This is a first for Polkadot and a first for DeFi as a whole,” seeing the potential for the expansion of both Polkadot and Polkadex with their parachain win. As Polkadex can now interact with all of the other blockchain assets within this ecosystem, the versatility of application of their platform has been radically increased.

Campaign Strategy

This round of crowdloan saw Polkadex become the very first parachain auction to surpass it’s 90% target cap of $1 million USD, making this the largest in Batch 3. Part of what made this campaign so effective was Polkadex’s rallying within their own community, providing many benefits to users that decided to get involved with the funding opportunity.

Polkadex created an auction cap of 1 million DOT tokens, but offered 2 million PDEX tokens (which is 10% of the total supply). Due to the ratio they created, there was a 2:1 opportunity, with users being able to get at least 2 PDEX tokens for every single DOT token that they added to the campaign effort.

Considering the vast utility of PDEX, allowing users to get discounts on any Polkadex transitions made, lowering trading fees, providing governance voting, and even offering staking opportunities, it’s no wonder that the community flocked to this fantastic crowdloan structure.

Alongside token allocation, Polkadex offered the top 1,000 crowdloan participants the opportunity to get a utility-based NFT, which provides even further discounted fees on all of their Polkadex orderbook transactions once it has launched. These rewards were also distributed through several DeFi platforms that Polkadex partnered with during the event.

Large-scale exchanges like Kraken and KuCoin were all involved, being equally balanced by decentralized platforms like Equilibrium and Parallel Finance, allowing the community to get involved through whichever financial system they prefer.

Commenting on the fantastic community effort, the head of marketing at Polkadex, Dagmara Handzlik, stated that they are “extremely proud of the way the Polkadex community led the charge during the crowdloan campaign.” Following this, she stated that, “Polkadex is proof of how important a strong community is to the overall success of a project, and we could not be more excited to deliver the products we have been building with the eager support of Polkadexers.”

By winning this campaign and obtaining a parachain slot, Polkadex is one step closer to becoming the central trading engine for Web3 and DeFi as a whole, with the Polkadot ecosystem now set to benefit from this comprehensive, cutting-edge crypto trading solution.

 

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Crypto Liquidations Reach $1 Billion As Sentiment Falls To 10-Month Lows

The crypto market has been subject to large liquidation following the price crash. Coming out of the weekend, the market had recorded one of its worst crashes which saw bitcoin fall below the $30,000 territory for the first time this year. With this had come hundreds of millions in short liquidations. However, the bloodbath seems far from over as the market continues to crumble and liquidations have now run over the $1 billion mark.

Crypto Traders Getting Rekt

After the crash that rocked the market coming out of the weekend, crypto traders had taken a hard hit. However, like always, this is always skewed to one demographic, and long traders had taken the hit with 77.5% of longs making up the majority of the $421 million liquidation figure that had been recorded on Monday.

Related Reading | Bitcoin Price Hits Three-Month Low, What’s Driving This?

With Tuesday now on the horizon has come even more challenges for traders in the space. While most speculated that bitcoin would not fall to $30,000, it had done just that and even fell briefly to the $29,000 territory before recovering once more. The damage would be done though as more traders would see their positions liquidated in the market.

This number has now gone above $1 billion liquidated in the past 24 hours with Bitcoin and Ethereum traders bearing the brunt of it. Once again, long positions continue to dominate the liquidations as bitcoin struggles to find its footing and recover. The numbers are slightly better in favor of long traders falling from 77.5% on Monday to 71.8% on Tuesday.

Crypto liquidations surpass $1 billion | Source: Coinglass

The total amount of liquidations sits at $1.10 billion at the time of this writing. Longs account for $789.27 million and shorts came out to a total of $310.04 million. Bitcoin and Ethereum continue to rival one another with $354.77 million and $326.51 million in liquidations respectively.

Market Sentiment Dives To Hell

Along with the crypto market crash has been the dip in market sentiment. This really is no surprise as sentiment has been moving consistently into the negative for the past couple of weeks. However, the market crash has accelerated this movement.

The Crypto Fear & Greed Index now has a reading of 10. This is one of the lowest that the index has ever been in the past year. With the number so low, it puts the market in the extreme fear territory. This means that investors are warier than ever to put money into the market, with some opting to liquidate their holdings in order to avoid more losses.

Related Reading | Ethereum Miners Surpass Bitcoin Miner Revenue By $224M

One thing to note though is that low sentiment can also be a prelude to a bull rally. The last time the index was this low was in July 2021. What followed was a recovery that eventually served as the lift-off point for bitcoin hitting its all-time high of $69,000. If history repeats itself, then this may very well be another start to a massive bull rally. That is if the bottom of the current crash has been achieved. 

Crypto market loses over $1 trillion | Source: Crypto Total Market Cap on TradingView.com
Featured image from ITPro Today, chart from TradingView.com