Crypto market looks set for volatility as FOMC and massive options expiry draw closer

September has historically seen Bitcoin performing poorly, and this year isn’t much different so far. Like previous weeks, this week also started with a 5% drop in BTC’s price from \(19,500 to \)18,200. Overall bearish macroeconomic factors have continued to tax stock and crypto markets, however, the next FOMC meeting scheduled for Sept. 21, 2022 will set the tone for the coming weeks.

Additionally, the upcoming Deribit BTC options expiry on Sept. 30 should also be on traders’ radar since it has a notional value of \(1.66 billion and a max pain of \)24,000. Apart from the FOMC, this expiry is also capable of moving the price, albeit to the upside.

Source: Deribit

Top alt-coin gainers and losers

Gainers:

Helium (HNT): +3.96% Algorand ALGO: +3.46% Cosmos ATOM: +0.46%

Losers:

Ethereum Classic ETC: -13.11% Phoenix Global PHB: -12.57% BitDAO BIT: -11.68%

Helium saw its HNT token leading the top gainers today following a mixup on Binance, where the exchange counted HNT and MOBILE tokens as the same and ended up sending 4.8 million HNT tokens to users who deposited MOBILE. The mistake resulted in a massive sell off and the exchange is now believed to be planning a buy back for HNT — causing traders to jump back into the trade.

BTC Technical Analysis

Bulls find their feet at \(18,200 but still have a long way to go before they can rest easy. We can see \)19,300 played a massive role in the previous rally up to \(22,700, hence if bulls remain strong before testing this resistance we could see some strong upside. On the contrary if \)18,200 gets broken we will be looking to test our previous lows from June at $17,600.

ETH Technical Analysis

Despite the successful merge on September 15, Ethereum is down 21% from its pre-merge price. Currently, ETH is trading between \(1300-1350 with \)1250 as the next acting support. Failing to hold \(1250 could result in capitulation down to \)1060. However, notably, ETH’s recent loss of market cap is still not as severe as BTC’s. The second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap was able to retain its value, and is still 50% above its lows from June, whereas BTC could only manage 5%.

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Disclaimer: None of the information here constitutes financial advice and market participants are advised to conduct their own research since cryptocurrencies are speculative assets with considerable risks.