First of the Month Sees Bitcoin Skyrocket to $6900 plus

According to the spot value across some of the world’s popular exchanges, bitcoin has reached an average of 6,915 on the first of the present month. Currently, the price is hovering just above 6,800 after some sell-off. The digital asset has been relentless all year long, seeing $500-1,000 increases with ease and sometimes in a day. At the moment bitcoin commands a $116B market capitalization with over $3B in trade volume over the past 24-hours. Besides bitcoin cash markets, which are up over 19 percent, nearly every other digital asset is dropping. The top five exchanges swapping the most bitcoin this evening include Bitfinex, Bithumb, Bitflyer, GDAX, and Hitbtc.

Right now Japan is leading the pack, with the yen commanding 60 percent of the BTC volume by currency. The rest of the currencies following the Japanese yen include the USD, KRW, EUR, and the GBP. Moreover, gone are the days when China captured the lion’s share of bitcoin trade volume. Chinese trade volume has seen the CNY plummet from the fifth position just a few weeks ago, to an all-time low of nineteen out of all the world’s bitcoin trades. However Chinese trade volume, using over-the-counter (OTC) networks like Localbitcoins, has increased substantially.

Bitcoin prices are up well over 500 percent during the course of 2017 and are outpacing nearly every currency and commodity in the world, performance-wise. Currently, charts show incredibly bullish buy pressure and targets set at $7K are definitely attainable. The short-term Simple Moving Average (SMA) is coasting well above the long-term trendline, which means the path to the upside has very little resistance. Fibonacci retracement at 61.8 over the past 24-hours indicates an upwards trajectory of $7,200. The RSI is holding steady northbound, while order books show a mountain of sellers at the $7K range. If buyers can breach this zone, it might be really smooth sailing all the way to $7,600. If things are to go south, there is a vast amount of buyers around the 6,600 zone acting as the first solid foundation. After the sell-off, it’s likely we will see consolidation between the $6,700-6,800 range.

At the time of writing, the only two digital assets in the green are bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCH). Almost every other cryptocurrency market is suffering from 3-10 percent losses or more. Ethereum (ETH) is down 5 percent at $289 per ether, while bitcoin cash (BCH) has reached a high of $550 across global exchanges. Bitcoin cash has taken the third highest market valuation, pushing Ripple (XRP) to the fourth position. Ripple markets are down 3.5 percent, averaging around $0.19 per XRP. Lastly, the fifth highest market cap held by Litecoin (LTC) is also down 4.6 percent with a global average of $52 per LTC.

Overall cryptocurrency proponents seem thrilled with bitcoin’s price rise as the currency continues to smash milestone after milestone in valuation. Bitcoin’s price will likely be volatile throughout the course of the next two weeks before the hard fork approaches. It’s anyone’s guess what markets will do during and after this event, as people are uncertain about how the pending fork will play out.

Bear Scenario: Prices are high and could correct at any moment. As stated above this month will likely see volatile price swings which could go either way. If things get bearish, then we could see drops to the $6,600 region and possibly a fall to $6,200 from there. Between those two points, there is a substantial amount of buy pressure as far as the order books are concerned. Anything lower than $6,150 shows we could enter the sub-$6K zone from that type of downward pressure.

Bull Scenario: Speculators definitely assume a majority of buy pressure is stemming from the Segwit2x fork. The assumption is people are dumping altcoins to get in on the 1:1 split distribution if that happens. This means a continued amount of buyers could bring the price well above the $7K range into uncharted territory. Currently, the Fibonacci and other tools indicate prices could reach $7,200 in the short term and possibly $8K the week before the fork.