The Wall Street spot ETF craze for Bitcoin, followed by President Donald Trump’s historic overtures to the Web3 industry and reelection with a mandate in November, pushed its price to all-time highs.

BTC entered Q4 last year at $60,800 and by Jan. 20th, shot up to a record of over $109,000. But soon after, the asset began a steep correction back to $85,000 to start off Q2.

Bitcoin’s Price Dip in Q1

Traders who bought at the Oct. 1 price last year were up by 79% the day of Trump’s inauguration. If they held through Mar. 31, they would still be up by 40%.

By most historical benchmarks, that’s very fast growth for the average American individual investor’s dollar. Some might say it is too fast and too risky, pointing to the volatility of Bitcoin markets, with such dramatic price swings in both directions.

But interestingly, Bitcoin’s price isn’t the only global economic benchmark that traced a dramatic upward swing through 2024 with a steep correction starting in Q1 of this year.

US stocks in the benchmark S&P 500 Index and Nasdaq Composite charted the exact same pattern. The 30-day BTC Pearson Correlation to US stocks has remained positive since last August.

Moreover, the Bitcoin/stocks correlation accelerated into the financial melt up in Q4 and again during the course correction in Q1. So these trends indicated the macro forces in the economy for these price movements.

Bitcoin’s Price and Orange Prices Locked in Weird Correlation

Why orange juice is so expensive https://t.co/mF1WQn6LXi

— CNBC (@CNBC) April 3, 2025

Here’s where it gets even more interesting.

Bitcoin’s rally in 2024, bull run in Q4, and correction in Q1 also traced the same path through exchange markets that global orange prices followed over the same time periods.

Although the average global price of an orange was $3.21 in Jan. 2024, by last December it had risen sharply to $5.09. But by last month, it had fallen to $2.71, according to IMF data at the Federal Reserve.

It’s more economic data on the side of the theory that BTC’s price growth is mostly a function of the dollar’s expansion over GDP. Rising consumer prices are the same as Bitcoin’s rising prices in the same dollar tide.

Curiously enough, this correlation between Bitcoin and the dollar has continued a trend ongoing since the 2023 and 2020 cryptocurrency markets.

This weekend, Bitcoin (BTC) pushed up 5% to once more flirt with $85,000, but seasoned analysts aren’t cheering just yet, suspecting a fakeout.

Crypto investor Daan Crypto Trades dropped a spicy warning, noting that the number one cryptocurrency has formed weekend gaps for six weeks in a row, with its price retracing hard by midweek every single time.

Weekend Mirage Strikes Again?

The market watcher pointed out that Bitcoin’s weekend pumps, often fueled by low liquidity and hype, tend to reverse within days. “Whenever a move is made during the weekend, it almost always retraces that move within the same following week,” he cautioned his 403,000 followers on X.

“So the saying usually is to not always trust the weekend move, even if it extends a little further early in the week,” he added, sharing a chart of BTC’s recent “gap-and-trap” pattern.

But not everyone is buying the dip doom narrative. In his usual provocative fashion, former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes declared, “It’s on like Donkey Kong,” pointing to signs that the U.S. Federal Reserve may unleash more liquidity to stabilize the bond market.

“Buy everything,” he posted after reports emerged that a top Fed official had admitted the central bank is ready to intervene. The perma-bull is betting that such a move could be the catalyst that rockets BTC into what he calls “UP ONLY” mode.

75% Say New ATH Coming

Hayes isn’t alone in his optimism. A poll by crypto commentators Altcoin Daily shows 75.5% of crypto enthusiasts believe Bitcoin will smash a new all-time high (ATH) before the end of 2025. Hayes himself has predicted $250,000 by year’s end as long as macro tailwinds hold.

The weekend pump pushed BTC to over $85,000, up from a low of $81,500, per CoinGecko data. A slight 0.5% reversal across seven days means that BTC is only marginally outperforming the broader crypto market, which is down 0.9% over the same period. Still, its dominance stands at 60.5%, with $31.3 billion in daily volume and a $1.65 trillion market cap.

However, the king cryptocurrency is down 23% from its all-time high of $108,786, recorded earlier in the year. And with liquidity thin over the weekend, one wrong headline could send prices spiraling into the new week.

Less than two months ago, the crypto exchange Bybit fell victim to one of the largest attacks in the crypto sector’s history, losing about $1.5 billion in ether (ETH) to cyber criminals. While the leading trading platform has recovered significantly from the effects of the attack, market experts have analyzed data that showed how it navigated the incident.

A postmortem report obtained by the crypto institutional-grade research firm BlockScholes reveals how deeply the hack affected the broader crypto market, bid-ask spreads, and the role of Bybit’s new Retail Price Improvement (RPI) orders in the platform’s recovery.

How Bybit’s Hack Affected the Market

Recall that the attack targeted one of Bybit’s Ethereum cold wallets. BlockScholes disclosed that the sell-off that followed the incident was not unique to crypto because the market was already witnessing a significant de-risking across crypto assets due to several macro events, including tariff tensions and the launch of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence (AI) model.

Analyzing the hack’s impact on spot trading volumes, analysts noted a short-lived spike in the hourly trade volume of all Tether (USDT) pairs away from the mean. After the spike, there was a significant drop in bitcoin (BTC) and altcoin trading volumes within the following days.

Bybit’s share in the spot trading volume market dropped from 11% to 4%, and the proportion of BTC traded fell from 50% to below 20%, while ETH volumes remained relatively stable. Although these volumes are yet to return to the high levels seen at the beginning of the year, there has been a significant recovery. The overall spot trading share has risen by a few points to 6-7%.

Despite the plunge in trading volumes, bid-ask spreads remained tight. This metric measures the difference between the lowest ask price and the highest bid price. A tighter spread indicates higher liquidity and lower execution risk.

Swift Recovery

After the hack on February 21, only Pepe (PEPE) and Official Trump (TRUMP) witnessed a significant change in order book depth; BTC and even ETH, the asset stolen during the attack, saw the lowest spreads, recording negligible changes after the incident. However, the order book depth of Bitcoin and Ethereum swiftly recovered within a week, a development attributed to Bybit’s RPI orders.

RPI orders aim to enhance liquidity exclusively for retail traders. The feature is a unique subset of orders placed by market makers or institutional participants that is open to only retail traders who manually interact with Bybit’s user interface.

Bybit introduced RPI orders on February 17, a few days before the hack. So, while the market tried to recover from the incident, there was a good depth of order books, deep liquidity pools, and tighter bid-ask spreads for retailers on Bybit.