Bitcoin Edges Past $67K as Analysts Predict It'll Keep Climbing

Bitcoin is starting the week having seen monthly highs over $67,000 over the weekend and early this morning.

At the time of writing, the Bitcoin price has retraced slightly to $66,868.04 after having dropped 0.4% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data. That means the world's oldest and largest cryptocurrency now has a $1.3 trillion market capitalization and accounts for more than half the $2.5 trillion global crypto market cap.

The sunny disposition of Bitcoin price charts has some analysts breathing a sigh of relief.

"Bitcoin broke the local downtrend, reclaimed the previous cycle highs - and now consolidates around $67,000," wrote pseudonymous crypto trader Jelle on Twitter. "It's time to push back into the seventies, and beyond."

At the start of the month, Bitcoin billionaire Arthur Hayes wrote in a blog post that he expected a few weeks of choppy and volatile prices before things improved. And before that, he shared his bearish outlook for the recent BTC halving, writing: "I believe Bitcoin and crypto prices in general will slump around the halving."

Last week, in a note to traders, Singapore-based digital asset firm QCP Capital hypothesized that enough time has now elapsed since the Bitcoin halving for BTC to start climbing again.

"It is now 28 days past the BTC halving and post-halving dip might be done," the firm wrote. The QCP analysts also noted that there's been a growing amount of interest in December call options—"indicating significant bullishness into year-end."

At the time of writing, there's $1.6 billion worth of open interest in BTC futures contracts on Deribit, according to Coinglass. The crypto derivatives exchange tends to be the most popular for trading BTC futures contracts. Even so, total open interest for Bitcoin is currently at $20 billion, so sentiment still hasn't crystallized the way it did leading up to the Bitcoin halving when total open interest went north of $30 billion.

The seemingly relieved trader sentiment appears to be in line with the most recent BLS Consumer Price Index last week showed signs that inflation in the U.S. had started to ease.