#GateSquareMayTradingShare

- Bitcoin price expectations: Bitcoin hits a three-month high driven by a derivatives rally:
- Bitcoin’s price rose to more than $80,000 on Monday, its highest level since the end of January.
- The US-listed spot exchange-traded fund recorded inflows of $153.87 million last week, marking the fifth consecutive week of positive flows.
- Traders should exercise caution, as the rise in Bitcoin’s price is driven by persistent demand for futures contracts while spot markets remain in contraction.
Reports indicate that the current market structure relies more on speculation than on fundamentals, reflecting the pattern seen at the start of the 2022 bear market.
Bitcoin’s price (BTC) surged above $80,000 on Monday, reaching its highest level since the end of January. Institutional demand supports this rise, as exchange-traded funds (ETFs) recorded cash inflows of more than $153 million last week, marking the fifth consecutive week of positive flows. At the same time, Bitcoin’s price is approaching an important psychological level. Analysts said the current market structure tends to be driven more by speculation than by underlying fundamentals, reflecting the pattern seen at the beginning of the 2022 bear market.
- Institutional demand remains strong
Bitcoin continues to rise, hitting a high of $80,635 on Monday after a period of slight stabilization in the prior week. Institutional demand supports this increase, and remains strong. SoSoValue data shows that Bitcoin ETFs recorded a cash inflow of $153.87 million last week, marking the fifth consecutive weekly inflow since early April. If this trend continues this week, Bitcoin could see further price gains.
Weekly chart of net spot Bitcoin flows into exchange-traded funds. Source: SoSoValue
Rise driven by derivatives
CryptoQuant’s weekly report highlighted last week that Bitcoin’s April rally was driven entirely by growth in demand for perpetual futures contracts.
The chart below shows that the recent surge in the “king of crypto” was more of a speculative rebound than a fundamental rise, as spot demand remained low.
A CryptoQuant analyst noted that “perpetual futures demand was the only driver behind Bitcoin’s April price surge, while apparent spot demand fell throughout—a formation historically associated with unsustainable price gains during bear markets.”
He added: “This divergence—rising futures demand alongside falling spot demand—indicates that the price increase is driven by leverage rather than the accumulation of new coins. Historically, these formations lack the structural basis needed to sustain price gains, and they usually end in a correction once futures positions are liquidated.”
- The current market structure reflects the start of the 2022 bear market.
The current market structure reflects the pattern seen at the beginning of the 2022 bear market, when demand for perpetual futures rose on its own while spot demand declined at the same time—an arrangement that preceded a sustained drop in prices for several months.
The analyst concluded that “similarity does not guarantee an identical outcome, but it shows that the current demand structure matches historical bearish precedents. Analyzing on-chain demand, consistently applied across cycles, identifies this pattern as a reliable early indicator of price fragility.”
The current Bitcoin market structure resembles the rally pattern seen during the 2022 bear market. Source: CryptoQuant
- Bitcoin price outlook: Bitcoin’s rally to a key psychological level
Bitcoin is trading above $79,700 at the time of writing on Monday, maintaining a near-term bullish bias as it holds above the 50- and 100-day exponential moving averages (EMAs), which are clustered around the mid-$70,000 range.
Bitcoin is also trading above the 50% correction level (drawn from the January high to the February low) at approximately $78,962 and the top of the parallel horizontal channel near $75,680, suggesting that the broader uptrend remains supported, while the strong Relative Strength Index (RSI) on the daily chart around 65 and the recovering Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) indicate that bullish momentum is still positive.
On the upside, immediate resistance is at the psychological $80,000 level, followed by the 200-day EMA near $82,193 and a 61.8% Fibonacci retracement at around $83,437, before a higher horizontal barrier near $84,410.
On the downside, initial support is noted at the 50% Fibonacci retracement level at $78,962, with expectations for additional demand near the upper bound of the channel around the $75,680 level, supported by the 100-day EMA slightly below $75,900. Deeper pullbacks will expose the 38.2% Fibonacci retracement level and the 50-day EMA in the $74,432–$74,487 area before reaching the broader channel bottom and the main support area around $63,000.
$BTC