Bitcoin’s recovery this week continues to lag, leaving most altcoin performances in the red. Now, investors are questioning whether crypto’s seasonally bullish October, dubbed Uptober, has ended before it ever really began.
Currently, the top crypto is down 4% in October, deviating from the month’s historical mean return of 19.84%, per CoinGlass data. Ethereum is down 5%, while Solana and other major altcoins are down double digits, per CoinGecko data.
The crypto market experienced a bullish wave of enthusiasm in the first week of October as buying pressure rose, pushing Bitcoin from $115,000 to a record high of $126,200.
However, macroeconomic pressure and the U.S.-China trade war earlier this month triggered a brutal selloff from which the crypto market has yet to recover.
Equities, on the other hand, have undone their October 10 drawdown, with the S&P 500 trading close to its record highs, leaving crypto trailing.
Is Uptober canceled?
“It looks like it for the moment,” Julio Moreno, head of research at crypto on-chain data analytics platform CryptoQuant, responded when asked if the Uptober is canceled. “Basically, every on-chain metric indicates we remain in a correction period, and price action doesn't look constructive.”
To put the price action into perspective, Bitcoin is nearly 12% away from the October 10 peak of $122,500 and less than 1% above the 200-day simple moving average, a widely used metric to gauge an asset’s bullish or bearish trend.
Multiple attempts to push beyond $113,000 this week have failed.
Bitcoin accelerated nearly 5% in less than two hours during the early New York trading session on Tuesday, but the gains were erased over the next eight hours, leaving the top crypto down to around $108,400.
“The sharp intraday swings we’re seeing across Bitcoin, Ethereum, and major altcoins reflect a cautious market sentiment,” Wenny Cai, Co-Founder and COO at crypto derivatives platform SynFutures, told Decrypt.
The market is stuck between optimism over institutional adoption and pessimism driven by tightening global liquidity, Cai said, adding that it was “unsurprising behavior” given this month’s historic liquidation cascade.
“It takes time to reposition again,” Moreno echoed, noting that investors may not have recovered from the October 10 crash.
Both Moreno and Cai agreed that the near-term future for the crypto market looks bleak. That outlook is despite the Fed’s decision to end quantitative tightening and hopes of another quarter-point rate cut.
The most significant risks for crypto include macroeconomic uncertainty and the spillover of the U.S.-China tariff war, experts previously told Decrypt.
Cai, however, highlighted that if prices were to fall further, it could reveal the fragility of crypto liquidity across exchanges and put Bitcoin miners under additional pressure.
“Until those factors stabilize, volatility is likely to remain the defining feature of this market,” Cai said.
