FX.co ★ Bitcoin falls in early April and altcoins steadily grow

At the beginning of this week, Bitcoin continued to maintain a correction after a spectacular rise in the second half of March.

During this Monday's trading session, Bitcoin decreased by 0.2%, closing at $46,300. At the time of writing, the asset is trading at $46,585.

At the end of Q1 2022, BTC lost 1.5%. At the same time, March was quite a favorable period for Bitcoin. The asset climbed by 10%, having strengthened for the second month in a row.

The cryptocurrency began a strong bullish trend on March 14, when it was worth about $37,000, and already on March 28, the coin reached $48,160 - a high of 2022. However, the asset faced a technical obstacle, and there was a period of correction. As a result, in just a few days, BTC was sent below the support of $45,000.

Notably, Bitcoin lost more than 16% in January. However, its price rose by 12% in February.

In November 2021, Bitcoin hit a new all-time high above $69,000. Since then, the cryptocurrency has been steadily declining, dropping by more than 40%.

By the end of 2021, the BTC price increased by 1.6 times to $46,200 from $28,900.

On Monday, the leading altcoins of the crypto market refused to follow Bitcoin's downtrend and showed strong growth. Thus, Ethereum added 0.4%, and Terra gained 2.5% yesterday.

At the same time, Solana gained 28% during the last week. At the moment, the asset is trading at $136.4. The altcoin takes sixth place in the top of the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap.

Solana's spectacular leap happened due to the steady expansion of its ecosystem. For example, Serum, the leading decentralized exchange on Solana, recently revealed its partnership with Burnt Finance, a decentralized NFT marketplace also based on Solana. Last week, another important booster for Solana was the announcement by the first NFT marketplace, OpenSea. It will add token support on Solana in April.

According to CoinGecko, a popular online platform that tracks the prices of digital assets, over the past 24 hours, the total capitalization of the crypto market declined by 0.3% to $2.25 trillion. The cryptocurrency index of fear and greed gained 4 points during the day and rose to 60 points.

Despite the continuous correction from the beginning of the trading session on Monday, by the end of the day, Bitcoin was able to recoup almost all of the decline due to the growth of major US stock indices.

According to CoinShares' latest weekly report, institutional investors poured about $180 million into cryptocurrency funds over the last seven days, with European investors showing the most activity, while US investors refrained from entering the market.

As for the preliminary forecasts of experts on the behavior of the cryptocurrency market in the short term, analysts at the US investment bank JPMorgan forecast the upcoming slowdown in the market growth.

Data on the fall of the stablecoins' share in the crypto market became the main confirmation of the experts' argument. JPMorgan considers this fact as an indicator of the potential to increase or decrease. As it usually happens, when the share of stablecoins is about 10% of the total market cap, analysts talk about the prospects of market growth. However, at the moment, this indicator hovers at 7%, which signals that the crypto market is about to decline.