Researchers are surprised to note that only inflation had a tangible impact on BTC’s price in Q4 2022, while other macroeconomic factors had little effect.
Messari analysts presented the “State of Bitcoin Q4 2022” report, in which they analyzed key information factors influencing the first cryptocurrency’s price. According to their data, the price of BTC reacted only to news about inflation during the last quarter of 2022. Other macroeconomic events, such as the Fed raising rates by 75 and 50 basis points, hardly impacted the asset’s value.
The main pressure on BTC in the last quarter of 2022 was the collapse of FTX and related events, which caused the first cryptocurrency to drop by 25%. However, market turmoil contributed to the growth of the number of active wallets, which rose by 2% compared to Q3. This was influenced by the fact that users began to actively withdraw BTC from CEX accounts to non-custodial wallets.
Regarding the informational impact of macroeconomic events on the price of Bitcoin, analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reached a similar conclusion. In their study, they found that inflation was the only news factor that significantly influenced the value of BTC.
The bank representatives took data from January 2017 to December 2022 for their study, analyzing the impact of macroeconomic news on various asset classes. Analysts factored in a wide range of media topics, including:
- inflation;
- real economy;
- monetary policy;
- forecasting, etc.
The authors of the study were surprised by the lack of correlation between Bitcoin’s quotes and macroeconomic news, the nature of which “should affect the price of Bitcoin even when interpreting Bitcoin as a purely speculative asset.” Recall that the value of the first cryptocurrency grew by about 25% since the beginning of 2023.
