"$20,000 has become the new battle front for Bitcoin"

This week starts with falls for the cryptocurrency market, with Bitcoin returning to $20,000 after failing to consolidate price levels above $22,000. Last Friday, the dean coin of the digital token market leapt above that mark, however, it has failed to consolidate its advance, which opened the door for it to stretch the rally above resistances at $23,000 and $25,000. The outlook for Ethereum is similar, falling back to $1,150, with a chance of retesting the $1,000 resistance level.

"BTC has fallen under and then reclaimed 20K a dozen times in the last week or two. Volumes are still pretty weak though, which is not a big shock considering the stalemate at 20k," commented Lark Davis, founder of The Wealth Mastery. "Half of the market thinks we are going to nuke down to 10k. The other half is waiting for some signs of recovery before committing more funds," he added.

Another sign that the market is in low hours is in the mining power rate or 'hash' rate, which has fallen to new lows, meaning there are fewer machines maintaining the blockchain-mining bitcoins. Mining revenues took a big hit due to the record market drop. According to data from Blockchain.com, Bitcoin mining revenue fell more than 79% in the past nine months, reaching a low of $15 million on July 4th.

The drop in revenue led miners such as Compass Mining to reduce its workforce by 15% and cut the income of its top executives. Others such as Marathon Digital, Riot Blockchain and others were forced to sell their Bitcoin holdings due to rising costs of operations.

On the other hand, blockchain analytics data shows that there is a lot of accumulation by mega whales and small retail buyers. "So that is encouraging," stated Davis. "Regardless of the next moves basically every metric is telling us that accumulating Bitcoin in this range is a bargain long term. Altcoins of course remain high risk. There are opportunities. But, altcoins are not going to do anything super significant until Bitcoin does," he commented.

That being said, "right now altcoins are providing some great trading opportunities. While Bitcoin may move up 2 or 3%, and altcoins might do 20 or 30% in a similar time frame," the founder of The Wealth Mastery explained. However, volatility is much higher. Ethereum, for example, has tried and failed to break through the next significant resistance zone in the $1,280- $1,300 range.

To conclude, buyers need to push the ETH price above $1,280 to gain enough momentum, form a higher high, and aim for higher targets at $1,700.