The start of the year was very positive for bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrency market, with BTC surpassing $24,000 for the first time since August 2022.
This comes after a multi-month bear market and atypical price stability late last year, when the asset fell helplessly below $17,000. Somewhat expected, however, the price increase caught the attention of retailers.
Retail investors are coming back to this
2022 turned out to be one of the worst years for bitcoin in terms of price action, and by the end of that year, the asset ended up losing roughly 65% of its value in USD. There were many reasons behind this massive decline. Some of these included macroeconomic issues such as runaway inflation, but also the collapse of former industry giants such as Terra and FTX hurt everyone involved.
At the end of 2022, Bitcoin fell below $17,000 and it failed to break that level in the first week of 2023. However, it finally happened on January 9th and BTC has never looked back. Quite the contrary, by the end of January, it soared to around $23,000, its best month in more than a year.
Perhaps the most important moment after the $17,000 break came when Bitcoin jumped above the $20,000 mark in 2017. This psychological trait was also the point at which retail investors decided to jump back into the space, at least according to analytics firm Santiment.
His latest tweet states that addresses holding up to 0.1 BTC stopped in 2022, but the number has skyrocketed amid the rally, rising by 620,000.
Since #FOMO returned on January 13th when the price recovered to $20K, there have been ~620K small #Bitcoin addresses on the network. These addresses worth 0.1$ BTC or less grew slowly in 2022, but 2023 shows a return of optimism among traders.
Greed is back
Another natural event triggered by the price surge was the change in the Fear and Greed Index . The metric, which shows the general feelings of investors towards the main cryptocurrency, most recently moved into greed territory for the first time in ten months.
The index stayed at that level for the next few weeks and was even close to extreme greed a couple of days ago when it hit 61 (out of 100).
