Bitcoin Holds Above $20,500 While Ether, Altcoins Try and Wipe Early Week Losses

The wider crypto market managed to mark gains for the second day in a row following news of the bankruptcy of major digital-assets lender Celsius. Bitcoin has managed to climb some 2.08 percent in 24 hours with its price close to the $20,500 (roughly Rs. 16.5 lakh) mark across global exchanges while Indian exchange CoinSwitch Kuber values Bitcoin at $20,996 (roughly Rs. 16.8 lakh), up by 1.88 percent in the past 24 hours. On global exchanges like CoinMarketCap, Coinbase, and Binance the price of Bitcoin stands at $20,556 (roughly Rs. 16.44 lakh) while CoinGecko data shows that BTC's value is currently down by 4.7 percent week-to-day.

Ether, meanwhile, has managed a strong upward surge over the last day. At the time of publishing, Ether is valued at $1,224 (roughly Rs. 97,990) on CoinSwitch Kuber while values on global exchanges see the crypto's value at $1,189 (roughly Rs. 95,209), where the cryptocurrency has moved up roughly 7.31 percent over the past 24 hours.

Ether's gains over the past couple of days sees the cryptocurrency's value cutting losses over the week to 3 percent when compared to its value last Friday, as per CoinGecko data.

Gadgets 360's cryptocurrency price tracker reflects much of what we see with BTC and ETH at the moment with almost all of better known altcoins seeing a surge in value — as the global crypto market capitalisation saw a rise of 3.05 percent through Thursday and early Friday.

BNB, Solana, Polygon, Stellar, Avalanche, Cardano, and Chainlink all see themselves in the green while Monero, Uniswap, Elrond, and Cosmos lead the pack with gains of more than 7 percent.

Memecoins Shiba Inu and Dogecoin have also managed to rise through early Friday. Dogecoin is currently valued at $0.06 (roughly Rs. 5.17) after adding some 1.63 percent in value over the last 24 hours, while, Shiba Inu is valued at $0.000011 (roughly Rs. 0.000875), up by 0.92 percent over the past day.

Ki Young Ju, CEO of South Korea-based on-chain analytics company CryptoQuant, has predicted that Bitcoin could soon see a massive short squeeze — a condition that triggers a rapid rise in its price. Given short liquidations accounted for roughly 10 percent of hourly buy market orders, according to June, there is a strong likelihood that such a scenario could play out soon.

The fact that Bitcoin could potentially experience another significant short squeeze doesn't mean that a new bullish cycle is about to start, according to Ju. However, it does indicate that the cryptocurrency is close to bottoming out.

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