Bitcoin Looking for $12,000, but Time is Running Out

Bitcoin had a relatively upbeat day on Saturday, enjoying a day without the futures markets, with Bitcoin gaining 3.61% to end the day at $11,493.8, well above Friday’s Cboe Bitcoin futures February contract closing price of $10,980.

Following news hitting the wires late on Friday of the NEM coin theft, there’s been very little negative news to hit the wires over the weekend, leaving Bitcoin free to more than recover last week’s 4.32% decline.

The weekend trends have been telling through the first few weeks of the year, with Bitcoin finding support and pulling the broader markets northwards, though with the February futures contract sitting at sub-$11,000 levels, there will be a testy time going into Monday, with the markets eager to get a sense of what lies ahead for Bitcoin and the broader cryptomarket.

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At the time of writing, Bitcoin is up 3.14% to $11,805.77, with Bitcoin hitting an intraday high $11,989.15 in the early part of the morning.

For the day ahead, investors will be cognizant of government chatter at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where there has been news hitting the wires through the weekend of heightened focus on a market that last year had been largely ignored.

Sentiment towards the global economy is positive, so governments and regulators will be eager to address peripheral asset classes such as the cryptomarkets under the disguise of addressing criminal activity.

Bitcoin and the rest of the cryptocurrencies may have been able to brush aside the Davos chatter, but without any major updates from the WEF, the cryptomarkets may need to wait until the start of the week for the news wires to begin feeding through what is likely to be a call for a coordinated global effort to impose some minimum regulatory criteria that may match those that are being introduced by the South Korean government.

Honest investors will certainly have little to worry about, other than the likely prospect of taxation, with the threat of having KYC and anti-money laundering introduced likely to provide some idea of just how much dirty money is in the system.

For the rest of the day, while Bitcoin may look to hover at its current levels, there may be some price pressure towards the end of the day, in the event that Bitcoin doesn’t manage to break through to $12,000 levels through the early afternoon.

There’s plenty of resistance and, while Bitcoin is unlikely to fall back towards today’s intraday low $11,360.52, the early part of tomorrow could be a different story.

Elsewhere, Bitcoin Cash gained 5.26% to $1,723.1, with Ripple finding support, up 4.55% to $1.2706.

Perhaps of greater significance is Ethereum’s 3.44% gain to $1,137.89, Ethereum managing to break through to $1,100 levels for the first time since last weekend’s high $1,164.97.

So, for now investor money has been returning, with Bitcoin’s market cap moving back up to $200.53bn and Ethereum’s moving up to $114.85bn, but how the markets will prevail next week may well depend on how the cryptocurrencies close out the weekend.

If the gains are held through to the close, the woes of the last few weeks may be behind Bitcoin and the major cryptocurrencies.

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