Bitcoin Holds Firm Around $19,000 in Anticipation of US CPI Figures

Bitcoin's price barely moved Wednesday as traders awaited important inflation data due to be released later on Thursday. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the consumer price index (CPI) on Thursday — a report that measures price changes in a basket of common consumer goods and services. The index is used to estimate changes in the economy's inflation rate. As things stand, the value of Bitcoin is up by 0.09 percent in the last 24 hours with its price now around the $19,000 (roughly Rs. 15.65 lakh) mark across global exchanges while Indian exchanges like CoinDCX value BTC at $20,109 (roughly Rs. 16.56 lakh), 0.18 percent lower than where its value stood early Wednesday.

On global exchanges like CoinMarketCap, Coinbase, and Binance the price of Bitcoin stands at $19,061 (roughly Rs. 15.69 lakh) while CoinGecko data shows that BTC's value now sits 5.4 percent lower than where it stood last Thursday.

Ether, the largest smart contracts token, has also shown very little movement over the last few trading sessions, dropping its value ever to slightly to hover around the $1,280 (roughly Rs. 1.05 lakh) range that we've been seeing the cryptocurrency trade around since the beginning of the week. Ether is currently down by roughly 0.32 percent over the past 24 hours across global exchanges. Meanwhile on Indian exchanges, ETH is valued at $1,360 (roughly Rs. 1.12 lakh) where values are down by 0.58 percent over the past day.

Gadgets 360's cryptocurrency price tracker reveals that most major altcoins lost some value alongside Ether with the global crypto market capitalisation numbers also falling 0.7 percent through Wednesday and early Thursday.

Cardano, Avalanche, Cosmos, Solana, Polygon, TRON, Chainlink, Monero, Uniswap, and BNB all see themselves in the red, although not by much.

Memecoins Shiba Inu and Dogecoin haven't been spared either. Dogecoin is currently valued at $0.05 (roughly Rs. 4.84) after losing 2.47 percent in value over the last 24 hours, while, Shiba Inu is valued at $0.00001 (roughly Rs. 0.000822), down 2.74 percent over the past day.

"Bitcoin continues to trade between $19,000 - $19,300 (roughly Rs. 15.65 lakh - Rs. 15.9 lakh) with its dominance at 37.9 percent. Looking at the current accumulation trend, whales with wallet balances of 1000-10,000 BTC have recently started to accumulate. On the other hand, retailers are distributing Bitcoins and are showing lower interest in the markets. This reflects that hype in the markets is settling and accumulation for long term returns has started," explains CoinDCX's Research team speaking to Gadgets 360.

"Meanwhile, BTC Hash Rate reached an all time high of 277.92 Million TH/s, up 12.83 percent from yesterday and 92.49 percent from one year ago. Increase in hash rate is majorly fueled by migration of Ethereum from Proof of Stake (PoS) to Proof of Work (PoW), decrease in prices of GPU miners and increasing crypto friendly jurisdictions from countries like Kazakhstan, Canada and Germany. With increase in mining difficulty and upcoming September CPI Inflation Data due tomorrow, markets are expected to be considerably volatile."

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