Bitcoin's performance has been relatively interesting in 2023.
While the last year and a half have been about Bitcoin's slow but steady decline from $69,000 to levels below $20,000, the cryptocurrency appears to now be picking up steam and has even rallied by as much as 70% to the upside since January 2023.
BTC, however, now appears to be struggling at the crucial psychological $30,000 resistance.
Because of the cryptocurrency's inability to break through this resistance level, investors may be losing faith in the flagship's ability to rally, and are starting to book profits.
But is Bitcoin's bullishness over yet? Some key indicators don't think so.
Glassnode, according to a tweet published during the weekend, has shown that for the first time ever, the amount of Open Interest in $BTC Options contracts (which sits at $10.3B) has surpassed that held in Futures contracts (currently around $10.0B).
But what is Open Interest?
Open interest, in simple terms, is defined as the number of open positions (including both long and short positions) on a derivative exchange's BTC/USD trading pairs.
Open interest helps traders gain a better understanding of the market's strength or weakness, bullishness or bearishness.
In the tweet, Glassnode pointed out that Futures Open Interest has been relatively flat in 2023. The blockchain analytics platform noted that this is the outcome of substantial call (or buy) options made by investors who have begun speculating that BTC may rise very soon.
This indicates that despite BTC struggling to around $30,000, the sentiment on the cryptocurrency is still relatively healthy.
In a later publication by Glassnode, the data analytics firm also noted that the recent surge in Bitcoin's price action through March has had some interesting results.
Glassnode noted that these BTC rallies have propelled the number of Non-Zero Addresses to an all-time high of approximately 45.5 million addresses, with only 96 out of 5206 data points recording a larger 14-day change in absolute terms.
Santiment, another blockchain data analytics platform has also noted that the number of addresses buying and keeping Bitcoin has surged recently.
"There is a rising rate of Bitcoin hodlers," Santiment said, via a tweet. the crypto analytics platform noted that traders and investors now seem to be more comfortable with leaving their holdings unmoved for the long term.
Santiment noted that we saw a similar trend from January 2021 through April 2021 when $BTC rose above $64,000 for the first time.
According to CoinMarketCap, the flagship cryptocurrency is slightly bullish over the last week and the last 24 hours.
Bitcoin has risen by only 0.13% over the last week, by 1.4% over the last day and trades at $28,200 at the time of writing.
One of the first things that become evident after looking at BTC's charts, is that the cryptocurrency is having a hard time breaking through $30,000.
Chart showing Bitcoin around $30,000
On the weekly charts, the last three candlesticks have been a series of Dojis, indicating that the cryptocurrency has been in this stage of indecision for almost a month now.
However, according to TradingView's technical overview of BTC, the cryptocurrency still has pretty good chances.
According to the chart above, the cryptocurrency has a fairly strong sell verdict as far as the oscillators go (left). However, this verdict is offset by an even stronger buy verdict on the Moving averages (right).
Taking all of this into account, BTC in summary, sits at a fairly strong buy signal, meaning that it still has a fairly good chance of breaking through $30,000 and hitting $35,000
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