Crypto Market Cap Down to $295 Billion, Short-Term Drop For Bitcoin Price Expected

Over the past 24 hours, the valuation of the crypto market has dropped slightly from $300 billion to $295 billion, as the bitcoin price declined from $8,300 to $8,150.

Tokens including Aelf (ELF), Holo (HOT), Zilliqa (ZIL), Binance Coin (BNB), and 0x (ZRX), which performed well against both bitcoin and the U.S. dollar last week, dropped substantially by nearly 10 percent.

The dominance index of bitcoin, which evaluates the dominance of bitcoin over the entire cryptocurrency market, has increased to 47.5 percent, its highest level since early January when the price of BTC hovered at around $19,500.
Short-Term Fall Expected

While the volume of bitcoin remains relatively strong in the $4 billion region, it has dropped by a large margin since its peak at $5.5 billion last week. BTC was able to sustain momentum in the $8,300 region for six straight days excluding a brief period on July 27 that led the price to fall by 6 percent temporarily, but has struggled to initiate movements on the upside. The weekly candle of BTC closed as a buy candle on July 30, demonstrating a positive mid-term investment opportunity.

However, if BTC fails to maintain its volume and falls below the $8,100 mark, it is possible for BTC to test a major support level at $8,000 and eye a drop below the $8,000 mark. If BTC finds stability in the lower end of the $8,000 region, a short-term bottom will likely be found at $8,000, with expected recovery to $8,500.

Despite the stability in the price of BTC throughout the past week, tokens have struggled to find any sort of momentum at the current price level and have continued to fall against both BTC and the US dollar. If BTC falls below the $8,100 mark in the next few hours, tokens are expected to demonstrate a larger decline in value, especially if the volume of the crypto market worsens.

Many tokens like ICON (ICX), ZRX, ELF, BNB, and ZIL, which are highly anticipated cryptocurrencies with fairly active development communities, experienced five- to 15-fold increase in their value subsequent to their token sales in early 2018. Since then, the value of these tokens has fallen by around 70 percent against BTC and over 90 percent against the US dollar.
ETF Over Exaggerated?

Earlier this week, Tabb Group reported that the over-the-counter (OTC) market of BTC is two to three times larger than the BTC exchange market, dominated by cryptocurrency trading platforms such as Coinbase, UPbit, and Binance.

Eric Wall, a cryptocurrency researcher, said:

“Just read an estimate from the TABB Group (in a $5,000 report) that OTC crypto markets exceed exchange volumes by 2-3x. That would mean 1-1.5MM BTC is traded OTC daily. Strange it’s not visible on the blockchain, which shows a meager 100k/day.”

If the OTC market is significantly bigger than the crypto exchange market, it is possible that large movements like the fall in the value of BTC on July 27 was caused by a big sell order in the OTC market, not necessarily independent events like an ETF rejection.