- Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $61,822.06 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 2.62% over the previous 24 hours.
- Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $60,033.53-$63,850.25 (CoinDesk 20)
- BTC trades between its 10-hour and 50-hour averages on the hourly chart, a sideways signal for market technicians.
Bitcoin’s slowly recovering from the news of Turkey’s coming cryptocurrency payment ban, which caused the No. 1 cryptocurrency by market capitalization to drop to near $60,000 before U.S. markets opened on Friday. The ban would take effect on April 30.
“Today’s weakness is mostly attributed to accelerated profit taking after news hit that Turkey bans crypto payments,” Edward Moya, senior market analyst at OANDA, told CoinDesk in an email. “The biggest fear for many crypto traders has always been that big governments might impose harsh restrictions on cryptocurrencies.”
The profit-taking behavior was also observed in the trading activity where the daily trading volume on eight spot exchanges tracked by CoinDesk went up from the prior day.
“The situation in Turkey is rather unique given the government is doing everything in their power to stabilize their currency,” Moya said. “Many on Wall Street believe that the lira is poised to fall over 10% in the short term, and that is forcing Turkey to impose capital controls and now also slow down liras going into bitcoin.”
Speaking on CoinDesk TV’s “First Mover” show on Friday, CoinDesk Global Macro Editor Emily Parker said: “Crypto cannot really be stopped. You can make it a lot harder to access, but no government has been able to successfully shut down crypto entirely.”
Ether and altcoins
- Ether (ETH) trading around $2,433.00 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 2.48% over the previous 24 hours.
- Ether’s 24-hour range: $2,306.59-$2,547.94 (CoinDesk 20)
- Ether trades between its 10-hour and 50-hour averages on the hourly chart, a sideways signal for market technicians.
Ether was moving in tandem with bitcoin Friday after logging a new record-high price above $2,500 a day ago in the wake of the Berlin hard fork upgrade implementation.
Meanwhile, the star of altcoins on Friday is dogecoin (DOGE), the meme token born as a joke in 2013.
At press time, dogecoin was changing hands at $0.35, up 160.67% in the past 24 hours.
DOGE’s trading volume is another sign of bullish sentiment around the Shiba Inu-represented cryptocurrency, the most traded cryptocurrency on centralized exchanges in the past 24 hours, according to CryptoCompare.
According to IntoTheBlock’s newsletter on Friday, the number of addresses holding dogecoin for less than a month reached a record high in February and continued to go up in both March and April.
The U.S.-based crypto exchange giant Coinbase, which went public this week, still has not listed dogecoin, despite the high demand.
“With the WallStreetBets and GameStop saga setting a distinct anti-Wall Street tone among retail investors, DOGE, as an almost ‘anti-crypto,’ seems to have caught many imaginations,” Richard Delaney, senior content writer at OKEx Insights, told CoinDesk, referring to the Reddit forum “Set in this context, heavy promotion from the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Cuban and an army of YouTube and TikTok influencers are fueling the current dogecoin mania.”
But as Du Jun, co-founder of another popular crypto exchange, Huobi, warned, there are risks around the beloved meme token. Despite the growing interest from new investors, DOGE holders are still highly concentrated within the top 10 addresses, which counts about 41.35% of all circulating dogecoin.
Other digital assets on the CoinDesk 20 are mostly in the red Friday. Notable winners as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET):
Other markets
- Asia’s Nikkei 225 closed 0.14% higher.
- The FTSE 100 in Europe was up by 0.52%.
- The S&P 500 in the United States closed in the green 0.36%.
- Crude oil (WTI): -0.57% to $63.10/barrel.
- Gold: +0.65% to $1,774.96/ounce.
- The 10-year U.S. Treasury bond yield climbed Friday to 1.582%.
