Bitcoin, ether wobble, crypto stocks mixed ahead of Fed minutes (Cryptocurrency:BTC-USD)

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Bitcoin (BTC-USD) and ethereum (ETH-USD) are changing hands within a tight range in Wednesday afternoon trading, as investors await the US central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee (“FOMC”) minutes scheduled for 2:00 pm ET.

As stocks gain some upside momentum intraday, bitcoin (BTC-USD +0.8%) is drifting up to $29.6K over the past 24 hours, while ether (ETH-USD -0.1%) is largely flat.

While bitcoin (BTC-USD) remains more than 50% off from its all-time high in November 2021, JP Morgan thinks there’s plenty of upside potential from current levels.

Moreover, JP Morgan analyst Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou has replaced real estate with digital assets as one of his preferred alternative assets because “the past month’s crypto market correction looks like capitulation relative to last January/February and going forward we see upside for bitcoin and crypto markets more generally,” he wrote in a note.

Panigirtzoglou pointed to the bitcoin-to-gold ratio, which has fallen modestly to 4x, suggesting “an unchanged fair value of around $38K” for the crypto, the note said. Overall, investors have shied away from bitcoin (BTC-USD) -22.9% and Gold (XAUUSD:CUR) -2.8% over the past year amid rising real (inflation-adjusted) rates, tighter financial conditions and recession fears.

On the flip side, Guggenheim Partners Chief Investment Officer Scott Minerd recently said bitcoin (BTC-USD) could drop to as low as $8K due to a restrictive Fed. He called the majority of cryptos “garbage.”

Crypto-focused stocks are trading mostly in the green with the exception of HIVE Blockchain (HIVE -1.0%), BIT Mining (BTCM -1.7%), Hut 8 Mining (HUT -1.1%) Greenidge Generation (GREE -0.7%), Argo Blockchain (ARBK +0.5%) and Stronghold Digital (SDIG -2.2%).

Earlier, Mastercard executive said widespread digital asset adoption will eventually come to fruition.

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