Bitcoin The stock traded sharply near $109,000 during Thursday’s Asian hours, extending the wide-ranging play since the Oct. 10 crash that wiped out $19 billion in leveraged bets and weakened risk sentiment.
ether With Solana (SOL) hovering near $3,850, And Barely moving in the last 24 hours. The pause follows a choppy start to October that has so far produced little progress for either bulls or bears – and is on track to deliver the lowest returns for investors since 2015, despite being a seasonal bull month.
The background is as interesting as it is eventful. The crypto market is in what traders are calling “sell-the-growth mode,” where every short rally fades due to reduced liquidity and changes in sentiment.
The fear index fell to 25, one notch above “extreme fear.” Bitcoin has been swinging between its 50- and 200-day moving averages for nearly two weeks, with each bounce selling off faster than the last.
Even Google couldn’t move the market forward. The tech giant’s announcement of a “quantum advantage” with its Willow chip — a milestone that some say brings the world closer to practical quantum computing — briefly reignited old concerns about Bitcoin’s cryptographic foundation.
The idea is simple: Quantum computers could one day crack the cryptography that keeps Bitcoin secure. In reality, this is still a long way off, as was discussed in December last year, but it is enough to remind traders how vulnerable confidence can be when everything else seems to be in tatters.
Still, with macro signals uncertain and the Federal Reserve’s October 29 meeting just around the corner, few are placing big bets in either direction.
“The market is balancing in this tight range, and that tells you how close we are to a bigger move,” said Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FXPro. “Either the bulls lose patience, or the bears lose confidence.”
At this point, most traders are simply waiting for something to break out – in price or in narrative. Even Google’s alleged quantum leap wasn’t enough to do that.
For a space built on speculation and narrative, indifference may be the most bearish sign yet.