Short-term Holders’ Bitcoin Stake Drops as Price Falls Below $50k; Stock Market Rallies to New Highs

The major crypto-assets continue to lack direction, with Bitcoin dropping back under $50,000 and Ether below $4k after the green Monday. Altcoins, however, are still managing to keep their gains, with the total market cap remaining above $2.45 trillion.

To start the last week of 2021, Bitcoin briefly broke above $52,000, only to make its way to just under $48,700.

Amidst this price action, Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego encouraged his followers to avoid fiat and invest in bitcoin.

“Stay away from fiat money,” said Salinas in a video posted to Twitter last week.

“The dollar, the euro, the yen, the peso — all are the same story. It's fake money (made) of paper lies, and the central banks are producing more money than ever. Invest in Bitcoin.”

On Monday, he advised his over 960k followers to use Bitso to buy some Bitcoin and then transfer them to their wallets. In June, Mexico's third-richest billionaire said that he was working to make his bank, Banco Azteca, accept bitcoin in the country.

On Tuesday, Joe Tsai, executive vice-chairman of Alibaba Group and owner of the Brooklyn Nets, also tweeted, “I like crypto.”

I posted this chart exactly 3 years ago today.

Price is exactly where predicted.

You don't have enough crypto for what will happen in 2022. https://t.co/9vDdGdLdWE pic.twitter.com/das6StlPcG

— filbfilb (@filbfilb) December 27, 2021

Meanwhile, S&P 500 rose 1.4% on Monday to close at a record high. While the Dow climbed about 352 points, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite also jumped 1.4%. Following the Monday session rally, the stock futures were calm early Tuesday as Wall Street looks to build on its record highs in the final week of the year.

The record highs came after stock dipped late last month, in part because of the rise of the COVID-19 variant omicron. This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it was shortening its isolation recommendation for people who test positive to five days from 10.

Stocks tend to rise during the final days of the year, often called the Santa Clause rally, due to light trading and thin liquidity.

But many like Morgan Stanley analysts have been calling for small gains in 2022 after two strong years as “probably a reflection that we’re probably pretty late in the cycle.”

The S&P 500 is up 27.6% for the year, followed by the Nasdaq, whose gain this year has been 23.1%, while the Dow is laggard with 18.6% gains.

This year, as Bitcoin got institutionalized, the crypto asset has been moving in tandem with the stock market.

sort of a puerile observation — crypto has undergone a multi-year institutionalization, with the inflection point being CME futures. It is now part of the global risk complex.

Correlation only describes common directional movement, not relative risk-adjusted return. https://t.co/mAVpzOCfGW

— light (@lightcrypto) December 27, 2021

BTC’s YTD gains have been 70.5%, while ETH has been up about 432% in 2021, as per Skew. Gold meanwhile is down 4.3%.

However, trading activity remains muted since the market gained momentum in Q2. But this could be a good thing, as Bithedge notes,

“If volume starts to increase during rally, not bullish. Means mkt is running into sellers, much ammo from buyers being spent.”

At the same time, the total Bitcoin held outside of exchange reserves has climbed to its all-time high, according to blockchain data firm Glassnode.

annotated to highlight how typical BTC tops look like

hopefully we can see something like that again in 2022, or better yet in 2023, to easily flag a good time to risk-off, assuming that you consider BTC as still a significant tell for general crypto segment risk appetite https://t.co/jcgeDaQX2s pic.twitter.com/E5RMqMYIYu

— 찌 G 跻 じ ( 𝙃𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙞, 𝙎𝙚𝙣𝙥𝙖𝙞 ) (@DegenSpartan) December 28, 2021

This increase in sovereign supply comes as long-term holders see their ownership stake grow by 4.8% to reach 74.8% of all sovereign supply of bitcoin over the past year. Short-term holders’ Bitcoin ownership, on the other hand, has dropped to 25.2%, from 28% in January.

“Such on-chain behavior is more typically observed during bitcoin bear markets, which in hindsight are effectively lengthy periods of coin redistribution from weaker hands, to those with stronger, and longer-term conviction,” Glassnode wrote.