Bitcoin blasted through the $90,000 resistance level early in the U.S. trading day and then quickly pushed even higher to top $93,000.
The surge was fueled by heavy demand, with the Coinbase Premium Index at its highest level since April.
Blackrock’s iShares Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) was the fourth-most traded product across all ETFs, with $1.2 billion volume in the first hour of the session.
After bouncing off the $90,000 level multiple occasions earlier this week, bitcoin BTC moved through that resistance during U.S. morning hours Wednesday. Once through, further gains ensured, with the price quickly rising past $93,000.
The breakthrough over the key price level happened right as U.S. traditional markets opened at 9:30 am E.T., indicating that strong demand from U.S. investors propelled prices higher.
Bitcoin’s Coinbase Premium Index, a key gauge of U.S. demand, has jumped to 0.2, its highest reading since April, CryptoQuant data showed, underscoring the heavy buying pressure coming from U.S. players.
The metric measures the price difference for the leading crypto asset on Coinbase, widely used by U.S.-based investors and institutions, compared to prices on off-shore Binance, the most popular global exchange by trading volume.
While it was not immediately clear what type of market participants are buying, U.S.-listed spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETF) started the day with strong trading volumes. Shares of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, IBIT, the largest spot ETF with $40 billion of assets, traded around $1.2 billion in the first hour of the session, making it the fourth most-traded product across all ETFs, per Barchart data.
Bitcoin at press time had pulled back a bit and was changing hands at $92,200, up almost 7% over the past 24 hours and leading over the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index’s 3.5% rise. Ethereum’s ether (ETH) and solana (SOL) gained 1.6% and 2.7%, respectively, during the same period.
Spot cumulative volume delta (CVD) — defined as the net difference between buying and selling trade volumes — continues to show strong flows with the majority of the net volume coming from buyers. Each time there’s been a spike in spot CVD, it has corresponded to a rise in the asset’s price, which suggests this rally is more sustainable as the buying is not futures-market based, said CoinDesk analyst James Van Straten.