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Bitcoin rises as China talks, Fed cut trigger risk appetite

Uptober is back on for bitcoin.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Bitcoin reclaimed $115,000 over the weekend and is up 1% in the past 24 hours as optimism over trade talks with China and the impending Fed rate cut decision on Wednesday are buoying market risk appetite.

Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, wrote in a note that the bitcoin-gold ratio is rising, a positive sign, and said that ETF rotation back into bitcoin would further solidify bitcoin’s trajectory. 

“Wed-Fri last week saw more than USD2bn leave US gold ETFs. It would be confirmation of a more positive bitcoin backdrop if we had half of that re-enter Bitcoin ETFs Mon-Wed this week,” he wrote.

According to Farzam Ehsani, cofounder and CEO of crypto exchange VALR, the next technical milestone to overcome sits at the $116,000 to $117,000 range, with potential upside targets in the $126,000 to $130,000 range by year-end. 

“However, without the broader participation of retail buyers and a resurgence in ETF inflows, the current rally may remain structurally dependent on whales and institutional desks — leaving it vulnerable to sudden profit-taking if the macro narrative falters,” he said.

Timothy Misir, head of research at Blockhead Research Network, echoed the sentiment, saying that while macro headlines did the heavy lifting, “the market’s reaction function is now very headline-dependent: good news sparks outsized squeezes; any backtracking could provoke sharp reversals.”

Misir said in a Monday note that a bull trigger would be sustained ETF inflows, while a bear trigger would be a reversal in US-China headlines or a hawkish Fed surprise. As for technical triggers, losing the $108,500 to $110,000 support band with widening liquidations would open a path to the next structural supports near $104,000 to $100,000.

Bitcoin ETFs registered $446.36 million in inflows last week, according to SoSoValue.

In other bitcoin news:

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

$389M

US Attorney David Metcalf announced Thursday the arrests of Ruslan Igorevich Tkachuk and Alexander Vladimirovich Ledenev, alleged senior members of AudiA6, a cryptocurrency money-laundering service believed to be responsible for laundering over $389 million.

The arrests coincided with a coordinated international takedown of AudiA6 and its infrastructure, involving the search of three properties, the seizure of servers and domains connected to the organization, as well as freezing cryptocurrency assets, according to a Department of Justice press release.

Tkachuk and Ledenev were “charged by criminal complaint with one count of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments and one count of sting money laundering,” the DOJ said. If convicted, they face a maximum possible sentence of 20 years of incarceration.

Per the criminal complaint, AudiA6 offered services to conceal the origin of cryptocurrency linked to criminal activity, charging fees of up to 5% of the amount laundered.

The two defendants are in custody of Republic of Georgia authorities, and the US Attorney’s Office aims to seek their extradition to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

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