Medha and Lisa Pauline Mattackal

(Reuters) – Cryptocurrency market indicators such as average bitcoin funding rates, inflows into crypto investment products and the ratio of old-to-new coins being sold suggest a near-term consolidation for the sector and lower odds of a year-end rally bitcoin bulls are predicting.

On Friday, the price rose by 1.6% to $57,850.56. However, it is on track for weekly losses exceeding 11%. This week was its worst since May. This is 16% less than the Nov. 10 record of $69,000. Ether (the second-largest cryptocurrency according to market value) was only 14% lower than its peak of $4,202.45.

According to market participants, the declines in week two were attributed to profit-taking following bitcoin’s highs.

The sentiment was also affected when Mt Gox creditors began to worry that they could lose their bitcoin-denominated repayments after the crypto exchange collapsed in 2014.

Over the last week, bitcoin futures traders are less likely to be willing to take on long positions. CryptoQuant’s cryptocurrency analytics platform has revealed that the average funding rates have dropped to 0.008%. It is an indicator of sentiment in the perpetual swaps marketplace.

Traders who have positive funding rates are likely to be bullish because they will need to pay for a long-term position.

Do we expect to set new records before the end? I’d say we’ve come a long way,” said Paul Eisma, head of trading at crypto firm XBTO Group in New York, adding he expected bitcoin to trade between $53,000 and $57,000 for the rest of the year.

Taproot, Bitcoin’s first major upgrade since 2017, which allows it to run more complex transactions on its blockchain, was highly telegraphed. Experts said that market participants priced in the Taproot upgrade as Bitcoin rallied towards the event.

Glassnode data provider blockchain says that there has been an increase in older coin purchases, which is associated with long-term investor exiting positions. But it still remains relatively low.

The ratio of short-term and longer-term bitcoin owners indicated a stable equilibrium. This could be between one week and one year old coins. It indicates a balance distribution between older and younger, smart money investors, and may indicate a period of consolidation. Large volumes of coins held by investors younger than them are often the cause for price spikes.

The year’s second-half has seen a decrease in crypto product inflows, with an average of $750 million per day compared to $960 million the first half. This was according to data from CoinShares, which came Monday.

According to CoinShares, the total inflows of crypto investments products for 2017 reached a new record high of $9 billion.

This refers to our 60K market not being overheated. Justin d’Anethan (institutional sales manager, crypto trading company EQONEX) wrote that there is still a lot to do.

ALTCOINS FALTER

A wider Nasdaq crypto index tracks the most popular digital assets, such as bitcoin and Ethereum, with weekly drops of 9.8%.

Dogecoin was one of the so-called meme coins. It was created by early crypto users as a joke and has risen over 4,000% since then. CoinGecko reported that it rose 2.5% to $0.23 per day. However, the cryptocurrency’s popularity dropped 17% in the last 7 days.

According to CoinGecko the total market capitalization for cryptocurrencies was $2.7 trillion, down from $3 trillion at its peak.