The Bitcoin bull market officially started on March 1, according to pseudonymous quantitative analyst PlanB, who is also the creator of the controversial stock-to-flow (S2F) model for Bitcoin’s price.
The Bitcoin (BTC) accumulation phase has ended, along with the easy Bitcoin buying opportunities, according to an X post by PlanB, referencing the S2F chart.
The pseudonymous analyst’s prediction came two days after Bitcoin breached $60,000 for the first time in over two years. Bitcoin fell 0.75% in the 24 hours to 3:00 pm Central European Time to change hands at $62,472.
While the S2F model gained popularity during the 2021 bull run, it’s far from being a perfect Bitcoin price oracle. According to the chart, Bitcoin should have breached the $100,000 mark in early August 2021, when Bitcoin was trading around the $44,000 mark. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has also criticized the S2F model for giving investors a “false sense of certainty.”
PlanB’s predictions are in line with other analyst expectations. According to Vetle Lunde, a senior analyst at K33 Research, Bitcoin usually consolidates during the period immediately after the halving but rallies in the following months. Lunde told Cointelegraph:
Beyond the much anticipated halving, the recently approved spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have also contributed to the growing investor interest in Bitcoin and its subsequent price appreciation.
Bitcoin price saw a 3% correction after Grayscale’s recently converted Grayscale Bitcoin Trust ETF dumped $598.9 million worth of BTC on Feb. 29. Despite the outflows, Bitcoin price is up over 22% during the past week, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Excluding Grayscale’s ETF, the nine new spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded over $2 billion in combined daily volume for the second consecutive day on Feb. 28. The new ETFs accounted for 75% of new Bitcoin investments since their launch on Jan. 11, according to a report by on-chain data analytics firm CryptoQuant.
The ETFs have introduced passive, price-agnostic demand for the first time in Bitcoin’s history, which will lead to new all-time highs before the end of 2024, according to a research report by Bitfinex Analysts, shared with Cointelegraph.
Related: US gov’t moved $922 million of seized Bitcoin after BTC price broke $60,000