The global crypto market registered marginal recovery over the last 24 hours. The cumulative market cap now stands at around $922.7 billion and the total trading volume has jumped more than 16% to $76.2 billion. However, the cryptocurrency Fear & Greed Index was down to 20 by Monday versus 22 a week earlier and 24 a day earlier and remains in a state of extreme fear.

Last week, US equities fell as the CPI report implied tighter monetary policy, followed by a rally amid prospects that tight monetary policy will cause a downturn that would prompt loose monetary policy. The S&P 500 started the day down and then rallied to end the day up 4.7%n - a similar fate to cryptocurrencies.

What you need to know

With the crypto market easily swung by the Fed and US economic indicators, we expect the correlation with the NASDAQ 100 to continue. Later today, NY Empire State Manufacturing numbers for October will draw interest from investors.

Speaking of economic indicators, last week’s FOMC meeting minutes revealed that some members are willing to ease the pace of rate hikes should economic indicators reflect cracks in the economy. This was reflected in the increased sensitivity to the last ISM Manufacturing PMI survey.

Despite the negative external backdrop, the likes of BTC has successfully held its September lows against much more worrisome sentiment in the stock markets. We see this stability in crypto prices as evidence of solid internal demand for risk.

As far as predictions go, down is likely to be the next direction for crypto markets, especially if there is an October stock slump in correlation with historic performance of equities. A recovery will be even harder if the USD index continues to rise, as it has done since Friday.

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Bitcoin’s price has hovered around the $19,000 mark for most of October, as bulls and bears failed to move prices significantly in either direction. BTC was trading at $19,268 at the time of writing, noting a 23.72% rise in daily trade volumes to kick off the week.

Even though the market hopes for recovery after a long bearish spell, Bitcoin’s technicals do not show rallying signals just yet. On the long-term chart, the BTC price is testing the lower late-2020 levels that it recovered from following the pandemic-led downfall. One major difference between these two time periods is the significantly higher trading volumes this time around.

Our take

Owing to low demand and high macroeconomic uncertainty, BTC’s price could be stuck within the $19,000 to $20,500 range for a bit longer before any major moves are seen.

Going forward, there are two important things that need to occur for Bitcoin price to flip bullish:

• Bitcoin price needs to overcome the 30-day Exponential Moving Average (EMA) at $19,516.
• Beyond conquering the 30-day EMA, BTC needs to flip the $20.306 to $20,737 resistance area.

If these two events occur with a strong daily close, Bitcoin price could kick-start a run-up to $22,048 and rebalance the Fair Value Gap (FVG), aka inefficiency.

Ethereum’s price has struggled since it completed the merge. The asset’s value has decreased by more than 9% in the last 30 days. During this period, the value of ETH went from $1,600 to $1,386. For context, BTC only dropped by 3.14% over the same time.

This loss in value could be partially attributed to whale activity. According to the blockchain analytics company, sharks and whales have dumped $4.2 billion worth of Ethereum. Dumping has played a role in influencing the value of ETH versus Bitcoin during the period.

Before the dumping started, ETH whales and sharks accumulated 2.2 million ETH, causing ETH/BTC ratio to increase by 43.3%. However, since the massive sales began in the last five weeks, there has been a 12.7% drop in ETH/BTC ratio.

There is also controversy over the censorship-compliant MEV-boost relays in the Ethereum ecosystem. These Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) boost-relays are raising censorship concerns due to their compliance with the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) rules. At the time of writing, 51% of all Ethereum transaction blocks were determined to be OFAC compliant by MEV analytics site mevWatch info - meaning that 51% of Ethereum blocks can now be fully censored.

In the alts world, today’s top gainer is Casper (CSPR) which was up 17.95% at $0.04743. The top loser is TerraClassicUSD (USTC), which was trading at $0.03734 with a 9.86% decrease in the last 24 hours to Monday morning.

Elsewhere, Solana’s (SOL) price was up by 0.75% at $29.99 today. Ripple (XRP) was down by 3.56% at $0.4687 and its 24-hour trading volume was up by 40.76% at $1,136,438,025. Cardano (ADA) rose 0.57% to $0.3681 and its 24-hour trading volume fell 0.83% to $338,728,179.

While most of the crypto market is in the red, a certain meme coin has been surpassing expectations. The price of the duck-themed RichQuack ($QUACK) increased by 400% within a month, including an 80% spike in 12 hours on Oct. 13, as the token hit a 90-day high.

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