BTC vs. ETH: Which Cryptocurrency Will Bring a Knife to this Gunfight?
Bitcoin [BTC] has seen a price drop that has dropped below $30,000. However, the decline was short-lived, as BTC’s price returned to the $30,000 level. It was trading at $30,015.14 at press time, with a market capitalization of more than $580 billion.
While BTC recovered, the second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum [ETH], did not. Its value has dropped by more than 2% in the last 24 hours. However, a recent CryptoQuant investigation suggests that the situation may soon alter.
On April 11, CryptoQuant published an analysis outlining many indicators that showed ETH could surpass BTC in the next few days. For example, the analysis stated that the relative spot demand for ETH has lately increased due to a fall in BTC spot trading volume. This was a positive development for the altcoin king.
Furthermore, futures markets indicated a likely shift toward ETH, with open interest and trading volume potentially bottoming out. The forthcoming Shanghai update, which will allow stakers to claim their locked rewards on April 12th, may be driving the derivatives market’s interest in ETH.
Wenry, an author and analyst at CryptoQuant, also published another research in which he expressed concern about the future of Bitcoin. The investigation found that the ratio of spot trade volume to derivatives has been steadily dropping since March 26. During Q1, the ratio was critical to BTC’s push. As a result, a drop in it raises the chance of ETH outperforming BTC in the short term.
Looking at measures for both cryptocurrencies at the same time revealed that BTC still had a slight advantage over ETH, with various metrics in favor of the bulls. For example, BTC’s taker buy/sell ratio demonstrated that the derivatives market was dominated by buyers.
However, according to CryptoQuant data, the opposite was true for ETH at press time, which could be problematic. While the number of active addresses in ETH decreased from the previous day, the number of active addresses in BTC grew.
According to Santiment’s research, BTC’s weighted sentiment was significantly higher than ETH’s, indicating investors’ trust in the king currency. Santiment’s tweet reinforced investors’ faith in BTC. The tweet indicated that a whale address received a 23,500 BTC transaction, the fourth-highest recorded transfer of the year.
Given the criteria, it is doubtful that ETH will outperform BTC. However, given that ETH is still waiting for a major update and a few key BTC measures are falling, it will be interesting to see how things play out.