Bitcoin Peaks At $52,000, Ethereum Gains Double Digits, Doge Back In Top 10: The Week In Retrospect

Major cryptocurrencies experienced marginal losses late Friday evening, despite the crypto market cap reaching its highest level since the spring of 2022.

Cryptocurrency	Gains +/-	Price (Recorded 9:00 a.m. EST)
Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC)	-2.2%	$51,150
Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH)	-3.2%	$2,750
Solana (CRYPTO: SOL)	-4.6%	$106.90

What Happened: Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) surged 9.4% over the past seven days, briefly reaching $52,000 on Feb. 15. The two-year peak coincided with the broader crypto market approaching a valuation of $2 trillion.

In other developments, altcoins and memecoins also benefited from a trending market.

Shiba Inu (CRYPTO: SHIB) saw one zero shaved off its trading price, while Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA) approached a breakout that could potentially push it past the psychological threshold of $0.60.

Furthermore, Chainlink's (CRYPTO: LINK) strong performance briefly propelled it ahead of Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) in market cap ranking. Dogecoin regained its 10^th position by the end of the week.

The week also saw notable activity in the artificial intelligence cryptocurrency vertical, driven by the launch of Sora and OpenAI's new text-to-video model. Notable AI crypto tokens include Bittensor (CRYPTO: TAO) and Render (CRYPTO: RNDR).

ETF Updates: Franklin Templeton filed for a spot Ether ETF, joining other applicants such as BlackRock, VanEck and Fidelity. Additionally, Coinbase was named as custodian in five out of eight Ethereum ETF applications.

Data from Santiment revealed that the seven most notable ETFs reported an average daily trading volume of $1.8 billion in the first 15 days of February, mainly after Bitcoin surpassed the $50,000 level.

Bitcoin Archive noted a rapid increase in assets for spot Bitcoin ETFs, now approaching levels similar to gold ETFs. Within just 25 trading days, Bitcoin reports $37 billion in assets while, for gold, it stands at $93 billion as of Feb. 16.

Notably, Santiment data indicated significant growth in Bitcoin held by wallets of various sizes.

In 2024, $12.95 billion was added to wallets holding between 1,000 and 10,000 Bitcoins, while wallets holding between 100 and 10,000 Bitcoin saw an increase of approximately $5.06 billion.

Top Gainers (24 Hours)

Cryptocurrency	Gains +/-	Price (Recorded 9:45 a.m. EST)
Siacoin (CRYPTO: SC)	+15.8%	$0.01459
Bitget Token (CRYPTO: BGB)	+6.5%	$0.976
Kaspa (CRYPTO: KAS)	+12.6%	$0.1602

The global cryptocurrency market cap currently stands at $1.94 trillion.

Bitcoin dominance stands at 52.42%, with the Crypto Fear & Greed Index at 76 in the Greed zone.

In the broader market, the Nasdaq Composite declined by 0.82% to close at 15,775.65, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average saw a slight dip of 0.37%, closing at 38,627.99.

This marked the end of a five-week winning streak for the indexes, attributed to concerns about potential delays in interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve following hotter-than-expected inflation reports.

With increases in two- and 10-year Treasury yields, interest-sensitive sectors such as technology, consumer discretionary and real estate were impacted.

Analyst Notes: Following Bitcoin's surge to $52,000, crypto analyst Michaël Van de Poppe examined the possibility of the market reaching $100,000 in the coming months.

#Bitcoin rallies to $50,000 and higher, are we going to see $100,000 in the next few months?

The ultimate question is what the price of Bitcoin is going to do in the upcoming period.

The inflow has netted more than $2 billion in a week.

What can we expect with Bitcoin? 👇…

— Michaël van de Poppe (@CryptoMichNL) February 16, 2024