Bitcoin BTC Price Fear and Greed Index sinks into neutral territory, reflecting investor uncertainty

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Good morning. Here is what happens:

Price: Bitcoin slogs below $30,000 as LINK soars. Other major cryptos are spending their day in negative territory.

Insights: Bitcoin’s Fear and Greed Index reflects a market that hasn’t moved quickly for the better part of six weeks.

Markets remain gloomy, but not LINK

A plummeting tech sector and rising dollar on Thursday kept crypto investors in their recent, limited trance.

Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, was recently trading at $29,809, down slightly over the past 24 hours. At one point during the day, BTC fell dangerously close to a one-month low set earlier this week near $29,500. More than five weeks after climbing on the back of several bitcoin spot ETF filings, bitcoin hasn’t been able to escape the $30,000-$31,000 range at least for long.

There is a lot of bearish sentiment on Crypto Twitter about this pullback, but I think the underlying factors are pretty simple,” Anthony Georgiades, co-founder of NFT and Web3 blockchain Pastel Network, wrote in an email to CoinDesk.

Georgiades noted that tech selling that was at least partly spurred by comments from Tesla founder Elon Musk that the electric car maker may need to cut prices, and the strengthening dollar, had weighed on “bitcoin and the broader crypto market.”

Ether, the second-largest crypto by market value, recently changed hands at $1,892, up a bit from the same time on Wednesday. Most other major cryptos by market capitalization spent Thursday in the red with XRP shedding some of its big gains from the previous day to trade below 80 cents recently by more than 4%, and ADA and SOL, the tokens of smart contract platforms Cardano and Solana, down almost as much.

The big exception was LINK, the native currency of the Chainlink software platform that connects blockchains with external data. It recently climbed more than 20% to trade above $8 after whales acquired over $6 million of the token, an apparent reaction to Chainlink’s release of an interoperability protocol.

Stock markets were mixed, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average continuing a recent winning streak, but the Nasdaq falling more than 2% on news from Tesla and weak earnings from streaming service Netflix. In a note to CoinDesk, Mark Connors, head of research at Canadian digital asset manager 3iQ, also pointed to the missed results from Taiwan Semiconductor, which put “an additional hit on AI stocks.” The dollar index tipped lower to continue a recent trend.

Still, Pastel Network’s Georgiades was cautiously optimistic about the crypto markets. “Underlying sentiment has not changed much since yesterday or the days before,” he wrote. I know permabears have called for a selloff, but it seems less likely to be in the cards.

He added: “Monetary conditions should soon ease here, and that will help act as a catalyst for risky assets.

Fear and greed become neutral

The metric, derived from Alternative.me, gauges investor sentiment across five separate factors and distills them into a single number ranging from 0 to 100. Readings near 0 indicate extreme fear, while readings near 100 indicate extreme greed.

Often, extreme fear coincides with buying opportunities, as investors are likely behaving too cautiously. Extreme greed can coincide with an overheated market.

The most recent reading indicates a market in flux, with no bulls or bears willing to take a firm stance either way.

All told, the reading adds evidence that BTC is poised to trade in a range for the foreseeable future.

This article was written and edited by CoinDesk journalists for the sole purpose of informing the reader with accurate information. If you click on a Glassnode link, CoinDesk may earn a commission. To learn more, see our ethics policy.

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