Getting Back on the Ice

Beef returns with on-chain updates

Jun 18, 2021

I’m a big fan of ice hockey. Here in the UK it’s not a very popular sport, not compared to soccer (ahem, football) and the biggest teams can pull maybe 8k fans a night if they’re lucky.

I also used to play ice hockey recreationally, rec hockey as we call it. A couple of times a week I would head down to the local ice rink for scrimmage and one night I would train with a team.

But during the summer, when it’s out of season for the pros, it’s also off season for rec because rec hockey isn’t a big money maker. The pro games bring in the cash, so they tend to hire the rink out for other events such as concerts during the summer.

When September rolls around, we meet old team mates we haven’t seen for a couple of months in the changing rooms. We extract dry and stiff protective gear from our bags and squeeze our feet into crisp boots.

And when we take our first steps out on the ice, despite being exceptional skaters, we’re tentative and off balance, out of practice. It’s remarkable what a difference a few months can make. Every one of us will fall over at least once during the first night back on the ice.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been very busy at work and also lending my dev skills working on the Grape Protocol for the Solana Hackathon. I haven’t had much time for writing.

I’ve sat down to write a couple of times and feel like I’m taking my first steps out on the ice after months of summer.

So to get back in the groove, I’m just going to write a short update about recent price action, on-chain flows and some things to watch out for next.

TA

Obviously we’re in a ranging market, for BTC the top of the range is around 42k, you could extend this to 45k. The bottom of the range is around 33k, and you could extend this to 31k when the bottom of the range gets attacked.

That’s what we saw recently, with BTC going after those lows and causing a nice V-reversal pattern which took us all the way back up to the top of the range.

There’s a lot of aggressive scalping going on around the midpoint.

I’ve marked some support and resistance zones on the chart with blue boxes.

ETH initially was looking strong following the sell off in May, finding resistance around 2.9k but recently has been showing a lot of weakness where BTC has been showing more strength.

ETH has yet to attack the lower part of the range like BTC did, and it looks like we’re setting up for that at the moment and could see prices around 2k again.

Exchange flows

Following the V-reversal on BTC we started to see a decline in BTC reserves. In the chart below the blue area is BTC reserves and the grey spikey line is netflow. This was intuitive, there was demand for BTC which outstripped the immediate supply (regular inflows), netflows were negative and reserves declined.

ETH reserves and netflow are not so clear, it’s partly clouded by a huge outflow of ETH from Coinbase that you may have seen or read about on Twitter.

But shortly after price rose on BTC and BTC reserves declined, there was an increase in ETH reserves, netflows were positive and price declined. It’s the opposite to BTC, supply outstripped the immediate demand (regular outflows) and reserves increased.

What to look out for next

I’m now a verified analyst on CryptoQuant and you’ll start to see me share regular analyses on QuickTake. Here’s the one I did earlier about Spot Exchanges vs Derivative Exchanges: https://cryptoquant.com/quicktake/60cc64f83aa5ad6a7dacd237-BTC-Spot-Exchanges-vs-Derivative-Exchanges

There has been an increase in the BTC inflows into spot exchanges. I posted this QuickTake whilst price was still around 37k warning there may be an increase in selling pressure ahead coming from spot exchanges. Sure enough we’ve seen that selling pressure take hold so far as price has dropped to 35k

Here’s the updated chart and we’re still getting unusual inflows at 35k and I expect this to put selling pressure on price over the weekend.

Be on the lookup to see if this continues. If we continue to the bottom of the range over the weekend, and these inflows don’t slow down, that would be a bad sign.

We did see a nice fat outflow just now, one of the largest in a while. So there is some bullish news!