The price of ether — the No.2 crypto with a market cap of roughly $190 billion versus bitcoin’s $380 billion — has risen 50% since the start of July while bitcoin has been flat.
Bitcoin’s been called a lot of things. Buzzy, beguiling, baffling, even bogus. But never boring.
Yet, of late, it’s been eerily subdued.
The king of the swingers has been uncharacteristically treading water for days at around $20,000 and hasn’t ventured far beyond that since June.
That spells trouble for traders and exchanges that profit from bitcoin’s wild price lurches, and is opening the door to its archrival ether which is preparing to up its crypto game by moving to a meaner and leaner blockchain.
«Bitcoin is not dead, it’s just boring at the moment, so traders are already looking for alternatives,» said Martin Leinweber, digital asset product strategist at MarketVector.
Bitcoin’s average 30-day volatility — a measure of how its price varies over a set period of time — has slumped to 2.7% from over 4% in early July, according to data firm Coinglass.
That number has stayed firmly below 5% in 2022, even in the most turbulent months of the «crypto winter» of depressed prices — a departure from the past five years when even periods of lower volatility were followed by spikes as high as 7%.
Similarly, an index from CryptoCompare, which uses bitcoin futures contracts to work out how far prices are expected to change, stands at just over 77, down from above 90 at the start of the year.
