Bitcoin Slides Below $46,000 on Its 13th Birthday: Markets Wrap

BTC briefly trades below $46,000 on the 13th anniversary of the genesis block being mined

article-image

Source: Shutterstock

share

key takeaways

  • BTC briefly trades below $46,000 on its 13th birthday
  • OpenSea dominates secondary NFT marketshare

Today marks the 13th anniversary since the genesis block was mined on the Bitcoin network on Jan. 3, 2009.

Perpetual funding rates remain mixed as traders place their bets on BTC price action.

Futures open interest increased to $18.45 billion from $18.11 billion yesterday.

OpenSea dominated the Ethereum secondary NFT market share throughout 2021.

Latest in Macro:

  • S&P 500: 4,796, +0.64%
  • NASDAQ: 15,832, +1.20%
  • Gold: $1,801, -1.49%
  • WTI Crude Oil: $76.03, +1.09%
  • 10-Year Treasury: 1.637%, +0.139%

Latest in Crypto:

  • BTC: $46,143, -2.20%
  • ETH: $3,733, -2.40%
  • ETH/BTC: 0.0810, +0.01%
  • BTC.D: 39.62%, -0.69%

Bitcoin turns 13 years old

Today marks the 13th anniversary since the genesis block was mined on the Bitcoin network on Jan. 3, 2009, according to Investopedia.

Lyn Alden, founder of Lyn Alden Investment Strategy, wrote on Twitter, “Bitcoin is 13 years old today, the anniversary of the genesis block. It’s an angsty teenager now, I suppose, which actually kind of fits. The US dollar in its current fiat form is 50 years old, born in 1971. Bitcoin is now more than 1/4th as old as the current US dollar”.

Source: @LynAldenContact

BTC slips below $46,000

Despite the anniversary, BTC price action has been sluggish. BTC briefly traded below $46,000 after trading near $47,500 in the middle of the day, according to data from CoinGecko.

Perpetual funding rates remain mixed, according to information for laevitas.ch, which implies a lack of consensus on price direction amongst perp traders.

Source: Laevitas.ch

Minimal liquidations

Although BTC has trended towards the downside today, there has been an underwhelming amount of long liquidations: $29.57 million according to Coinglass.com.

Futures open interest has increased to start out the new year. As seen in the following chart from Coinglass, this is slightly abnormal behavior to see futures open interest increase on a red day. Increased open interest implies more leverage in the market, which increases the probability of an explosive move to the upside or downside as traders are forced to close their positions if it isn’t going their way.

Source: Glassnode

NFTs

OpenSea dominated Ethereum secondary NFT trading volume in 2021, according to data from Dune Analytics.

Source: Dune Analytics

Trading data from OpenSea and Solanalysis of some of the top Solana and Ethereum projects can be found below:

Top Ethereum Projects
Top Solana Projects

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I am looking forward to catching up tomorrow.


Get the day’s top crypto news and insights delivered to your inbox every evening. Subscribe to Blockworks’ free newsletter now.


Tags

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

recent research

Unlocked by Template (7).png

Research

Union’s improvements upon Tendermint consensus through CometBLS, coupled with ZK proving through Galois, allow for a broadly scalable, cost efficient, and low latency IBC implementation that is feasibly scalable across every existing blockchain, virtual machine and runtime. The implementation offers modular crosschain interoperability without the need for trusted intermediaries.  

article-image

Kraken’s chief security officer Nick Percoco said the exchange turned the tables on a North Korean hacker

article-image

Or is it approximately the least cypherpunk thing we could do?

article-image

Over 20% of SOL-USD swap volume goes through SolFi

article-image

CEO Vlad Tenev calls expected clarity on listing crypto asset securities “a big opportunity”

article-image

Big Tech pulled US indexes back into the green Thursday, as investors waited for two more Mag 7 first-quarter reports after the bell

article-image

Charts and takeaways from Tuesday’s jobs report and Wednesday’s GDP print, as the economy digests the tariff war