Bitcoin (BTC) Eyeing First Monthly Drop for 2023, What’s Next?

The world’s largest cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) continues to face selling pressure and has dropped another 1.68% in the last 24 hours. As of press time, Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $27,268 with a market cap of $529 billion.

As it turns out, Bitcoin (BTC) is eyeing the first monthly drop for the year 2023. So far this month of May, Bitcoin (BTC) is down by brought 6.5%, however, it still continues to trade at 68% gains year-to-date.

With a high of $31,000, Bitcoin at one point has registered year-to-date gains of as high as 84%. However, the selling pressure this month has subdued the gains to 67%. Although Bitcoin investors showed confidence amid the banking crisis this year in March, it has been momentary. Speaking to Bloomberg, John Wu, president of Ava Labs Inc., said:

“What you really need to do to get another wave of Bitcoin and crypto-asset buying is to show real utility and development to get those crypto curious people to get into the crypto ecosystem”.

Bitcoin (BTC) Network Activity

Along with a strong upward movement for the Bitcoin (BTC) price, the Bitcoin network activity has picked up significantly. This involves meme coins as well as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the form of Bitcoin Ordinals.

Bitcoin Ordinals with BRC20 standard and NFTs gained massive traction leading to a spike in the BTC transaction fees as well as network congestion. Over the past four weeks, assets like stocks, bonds, and gold have performed far better. On-chain data provider Glassnode reports:

At the peak of the BRC-20 frenzy, #Bitcoin Miners were earning $17.8M in transaction fees, with only 2 trading days across the 2018 peak recording a larger fee revenue. Currently, Miners are earning $1.7M in fee revenue, a -$16.1M decline from the recent peak.

However, this remains significantly elevated when compared to historical precedence, with only 310 / 4674 (6.7%) trading days recording greater fees.

Earlier this week, Bitcoin gave a jump above $28,000 over the news of the US raising its debt ceiling. However, it remained short-lived and it seems that Bitcoin is once again following the shifts in the US equity market.

If the selling pressure continues further, we could see the BTC price moving down further to $23,000.