Cryptocurrency Prices Rally in First Week of 2019

In the first week of the new year, Bitcoin got rejected but still looked strong, Ethereum had a blistering few days and XRP chugged along.

Bitcoin in recovery mode

This past week, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Bitcoin (BTC) genesis block, which was mined on January 3, 2009.

After a drop to the USD3,600 area, Bitcoin kicked off the last week of the year with a high-volume retest of the USD3,950-4,000 area.

Despite multiple attempts to break this heavy resistance, the bulls were met with a greater amount of sell volume resulting in a retrace to the USD3,700 range.

Later in the week, BTC rallied up for another retest of USD3,950 and experienced one more rejection.

The important thing to note here is that BTC managed to form higher lows after each rejection, which suggests the overall sentiment, at least in the short term, still favors the bulls.

USD3,900-3,950 will be a key area to watch over the next few days.

If BTC can continue its trend of higher lows, a clean break of the 0.236 level and subsequently finding support on it would be a great first step towards a potential bullish recovery.

Ethereum races up

Ethereum (ETH) was the best performer this past week and managed to ring in the New Year with a 37% run to the upside.

Many speculate that ETH’s recent positive performance is due to speculation around the blockchain’s upcoming Constantinople hard fork, which is expected to take place on January 16.

The hard fork will bring a number of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to strengthen performance.

Zooming out to the 4-hour chart, we can see very little resistance between the current price zone and USD170-175, which is highlighted in red. If ETH continues it’s bullish run, the red zone could hold significant resistance, and a break above USD175 would be extremely bullish.

XRP lags behind

XRP has been performing well as of late, but has fallen behind BTC and ETH this past week. XRP has been trading itself into a clear wedge with higher lows and lower highs.

If the two trendlines continue evolving at their current slopes and rates, we should expect to see the formation of an apex around USD0.37 some time in the next 3-5 days.

In crypto, it’s always important to pay attention to past levels of heavy support or resistance to inform our biases about what may happen in the future. In this case, USD0.37 represents fairly recent support and resistance levels on the high-timeframe daily chart.

Overall, this past week was very positive for cryptocurrencies. Litecoin, EOS, IOTA, and Cardano all saw double-digit gains as the market recovers from 2018’s end-of-year dump.

With Bakkt, which received $183 million in seed funding, expected to launch by the end of the month, January is looking to be an important month for Bitcoin.