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Bitcoin peaked at $30,438 in Asian trade and was last up 1.4% at
$30,070. It has gained nearly 6% since the start of the month,
after rising 23% in March.
Investors are awaiting a U.S. inflation report on Wednesday to
assess the Fed's next steps after banking sector turmoil in
March raised expectations that the central bank would let up on
rate hikes to ease stress on the sector.
Boosting the case for rate hikes, however, Friday's
closely-watched U.S. nonfarm payrolls (NFP) report showed that
employers maintained a strong pace of hiring in March, pointing
to a still-resilient economy.
"There were some expectations of a potential miss on NFP on
Friday, and that's bolstered confidence coming into CPI," said
Joseph Edwards, investment adviser at Enigma Securities.
Crypto investment products attracted $57 million in inflows last
week - albeit on low volume - with most of the money focused on
bitcoin, digital asset manager CoinShares said on Monday. This
brings digital asset flows back into positive territory for the
year, the report showed.
"The market has done a great job at culling all leveraged
participants in the past 18 months," said Matthew Dibb, chief
investment officer at Astronaut Capital, a Singapore-based
crypto asset manager.
"If (bitcoin) can survive the week over $30,000, we are going
higher."
Ether, the second largest cryptocurrency, stood near last week's
roughly eight-month peak of $1,942.50. It was last up 0.5% at
$1,920.40.
Crypto investors are eagerly anticipating a major revamp to the
Ethereum blockchain on Wednesday that is set to allow them to
gain access to more than $33 billion of ether currency.
The software upgrade, dubbed Shapella, will let market players
redeem their "staked ether" - coins they have deposited and
locked up on the network over the past three years in return for
interest.
While Shapella is not likely to directly drive sell pressure on
ether, there could be heightened volatility around the event,
Bank of America strategist Alkesh Shah said.
(Reporting by Rae Wee in Singapore and Medha Singh in Bengaluru;
Editing by Vidya Ranganathan, Jamie Freed and Devika Syamnath)
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