Bitcoin is trading above $80,000, according to market data from CoinDesk, after recovering from Friday’s drop, but the bounce still looks more like a test of market resistance than a decisive move higher.
According to market watchers, market structure tells a more complicated story than price alone.
Following bitcoin’s rally, buyers are becoming more active and structural support from ETFs remains intact, but much of the recent activity is also being amplified by leveraged futures traders rather than purely spot demand. That makes the recovery more vulnerable to macroeconomic disappointment, particularly with inflation data coming.
Singapore-based market maker Enflux said in a note to CoinDesk that ETF demand and low foreign exchange reserves are helping to build a structural floor for BTC, while market indicators from Glassnode in its most recent weekly report show buyers becoming more aggressive in both the spot and perpetual markets.
The problem is that the improvement is not clean. Momentum has waned, leverage has increased, and funding is showing increased short-term demand, suggesting traders are still hedging against the rally rather than fully embracing it.
That leaves Bitcoin in an uncomfortable middle ground. BTC is up 13.4% over the past 30 days and remains above $81,000, but Friday’s reaction to the better-than-expected jobs report (the strong numbers mean the Federal Reserve is less likely to cut rates) showed how sensitive the market remains to recent cost bases for buyers. The headline figure beat consensus, but BTC fell from around $82,000 to $79,743 before recovering over the weekend.
“A security should have surpassed $80,700 cleanly, but the spot retreated first,” Enflux wrote. “That level is a real overload, not just a marker on the graph.”
If risk appetite is returning, why hasn’t BTC broken out more convincingly? Enflux points out an unusual point of comparison, arguing that the luxury watch market’s recovery may offer an early read on how wealthy investors are behaving.
Citing the latest secondary observation data from Morgan Stanley, the firm noted that prices rose 1.9% in the first quarter, with gains spread across 25 of the 35 brands tracked as value retention and inventory turns improved. The broader takeaway is not that crypto money is flowing into watches, but that wealthy buyers are re-engaging with risk assets where prices, scarcity and demand seem easier to support after a long correction.
That creates an uncomfortable contrast for bitcoin: If high-level risk appetite is thawing, BTC’s continued struggle to decisively overcome key resistance suggests that cryptocurrencies have yet to become the clearest expression of that returning confidence.
Glassnode trading data suggests that buyers are becoming more aggressive, but not in a way that completely resolves the issue of conviction. A key measure is the cumulative volume delta, or CVD, which tracks whether traders are buying more aggressively at market prices or selling at offers.
In simple terms, it helps show who is driving the market. Glassnode said spot CVDs, which reflect activity in the underlying bitcoin market, rose 46.4% from $42.4 million to $62.0 million, suggesting buyers are increasingly willing to pay rather than wait for cheaper entry points.
Perpetual CVD, the same measure applied to cryptocurrency futures, jumped from $110.0 million to $410.3 million, showing that leveraged traders are also becoming more bullish. That can accelerate gains, but it is a less durable signal than spot demand because futures positions can reverse quickly if sentiment changes. Caution signs are equally important.
Bitcoin, market watchers say, has a stronger bottom than it did a month ago, but the next leg up may depend less on the enthusiasm of crypto natives than on whether inflation data gives traders enough confidence to stop covering the rally and start chasing it.
