The bitcoin price is consolidating below the important $23,000 level and is still up almost 50% from its 21 November lows, despite pulling back 1.5% in the past 24 hours to $22,600.
If the largest cryptocurrency by market cap can successfully challenge resistance between $23k and $25k, that will be key to sustaining its uptrend revival – it could also signal the end of the bear market.
If and when bitcoin breaks through the $23,000-$25,000 resistance region, there is, arguably, an open road ahead to $30,000.
But it is worth dwelling on the fact that $23k is such an area of strong resistance.
We can identify three discernible challenges to the $23k level that failed to hold between July and August last year (see chart annotations below).
The three failures decisively broke down when bitcoin plummeted $2,000 on 19 August.
Expectations of a rapid and successful assault on this important price level has proved a bridge too far for bulls, for now.
However, the longer that bitcoin hovers around its existing price levels, providing sellers with the opportunity to offload, the more confident we can be of future upside. Bitcoin is gathering fuel to relight the fires.
Zooming in to the 1-hour chart, note the contrast in angles of the incline and decline of the green ascending channel and the current red descending channel.
The first channel was formed in the wake of a near-parabolic movement that by definition becomes unsustainable at a certain point. Nothing goes up in a straight-line forever.
By contrast, the current gentle retracement has provided room for sellers, which eventually can exhaust itself in the short term, opening the way for the next leg up.
The exponential moving average (EMA) ribbon and the Ichimoku cloud on the 4-hour
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