Around last weekend, the price of bitcoin started moving up, and then this week, charts exploded as we made our way to nearly $9,500 on April 30.

This sudden and sharp movement resulted in the digital asset seeing first signs of decoupling from the equities market after being almost identical throughout April.

But correlations rely on long term data and now that we are back on the weekend, prices are seeing a lot of volatility. Currently, BTC/USD is trading above $8,850.

“Nice run we had on bitcoin… but then it all reversed. ppl will tell it's because ‘halving is priced' and all that. But the truth is because the stocks dropped a lot in the last two days and bitcoin follows stocks momentum like its bitch,” said trader BitBit. “It happens in times of uncertainty.”

Lots of Activity

Bitcoin had a good rally in April and closed the month with massive returns that have the market turning confident again. Bitcoin specifically is showing true strength by increasing its market share while most large caps lost.

Amidst rising BTC price, the USDT market cap grew 25% this month to nearly $8bln, and “its price is trading structurally at a premium to US dollars indicating strong demand,” shared Arcane Research.

Just like Tether, USDC is marching towards a $1bln market cap as the world gets forced to accelerate digital adoption in the COVID crisis.

An increase in trading volumes across spot and derivatives is also recorded which means money is definitely flowing in the market. However, market participants are still withdrawing their BTC from exchanges. After the market crash, the number of BTC exchanges addresses declined by 10% and is trending downwards.

The total futures market crossed nearly $40 billion. However, open interest remains significantly lower than before the sell-off.

“A majority of longs were forced to exit on the 40%+ down day and can't come back as fast,” noted Skew Markets.

CME traders are back again as the open interest on the platform goes back to 2020 highs, surpassing $300 million this week.

While Deribit completely dominates the options market, BitMEX continues to struggle, recording a historical low open interest this week.

This reduction indicates that traders were forced out of their positions before they initiated new positions as on Wednesday, BitMEX had the 8th largest short squeeze over the past year. Additionally, this could be because of the recent flight from BitMEX to other platforms.

Meanwhile, it’s daily volume was 10 times the open interest.

1/ I'm fairly certain that BitMEX funding rates are depressed because of the lack of buy side demand that is a function of liquidity. Many large players use BitMEX to swing long with low exposure and with the recent evaporation of liquidity makes that less attractive.

— Avi IS RIGHT (@AviFelman) May 1, 2020

Additionally, crypto twitter is also doing the “heavy lifting” and seeing more activity than at the peak of the sell-off. “The bulls are pushing hard!”