Market Wrap: Bitcoin Pops to $36.8K, Other Cryptos Higher Despite Worrying China Signals

Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, was in the green Wednesday by 10.2% as of press time.

The price of bitcoin jumped from $32,557 at 02:00 UTC Wednesday, a 13.3% gain based on CoinDesk 20 data.

Bitcoin traders appear to be ignoring potentially dismal news for crypto in China.

“One signal in favor of continuation for the current bullish reversal is the amount of BTC seen leaving exchanges from an on-chain perspective,” said Sean Rooney, head of research for digital asset manager Valkyrie Investments.

As of press time, bitcoin futures OI is at $11.1 billion, an 8% drop and a reversal from ever-climbing futures OI seen earlier this year.

The second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, ether, was trading at $2,561 as of 21:00 UTC , a 2.3% gain in the prior 24 hours.

The price of using the Ethereum network, known as gas, has fallen to a three-month low, at 16 gwei median or middle price as of press time, according to data analysis portal Dune Analytics.

Peter Chan, lead trader at OneBit Quant, attributed the high gas fees to a war between competing automated trading systems for arbitrage opportunities in Ethereum’s decentralized finance, or DeFi, ecosystem.

“Alternative chains are putting a lot of efforts to take DeFi market share,” Le Rest told CoinDesk.

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