After the Bitcoin price reached a three-month low of $24.835 last week, the bulls currently seem to be gaining the upper hand again. The BTC price has continued its upward trend in the last 24 hours and has risen by 1.6% to currently $26,795. At one point, BTC had already hit $27,203 before a corrective move took place.

Why Is Bitcoin Up Today?

As always, one can only speculate about the reasons why the Bitcoin price is rising. But thanks to the filing by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, for a Bitcoin Spot ETF in the US, bullish sentiment has returned to the market. A Bitcoin Spot ETF is predicted to open the flood gates for institutional investors.

As NewsBTC reported, the history of the first gold ETF in the US in 2004 could be an indicator of the bullish impact that the approval of a spot ETF could have. The gold ETF has been instrumental in the adoption of gold by institutions. Within eight years of the first ETF, the price of gold more than quadrupled.

Basically, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has 240 days (about eight months) to decide on the application. However, David Attley, CEO of Bitcoin Magazine, yesterday that he had heard a compelling argument that the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF could be approved shortly (“days to weeks”). This news may have had as positive an impact on the market as yesterday’s news that Fidelity may also soon apply for a Bitcoin Spot ETF along the lines of BlackRock. Obviously, crypto Twitter has become much more bullish as a result of the BlackRock news. And large investors in BTC, so-called whales, have also turned bullish on the leading cryptocurrency for quite some time. As by on-chain data analytics service Santiment, whales have been busy over the past two months as the crowd watched the price fall. “Now back above $27k once again, it’s far from coincidence that wallets holding 1K to 10K $BTC have accumulated a combined $3.5B since the first week of April,” Santiment states.

Intraday trader @52Skew a similar observation with regard to BTC perp CVD buckets & delta orders: “Whales mostly driving price still, longs aped on this bounce, shorts still twaping on every bounce.” Moreover, the trader observed in the last few hours that there was a lot of demand in the spot market on Binance, the largest crypto exchange. According to him, spot buying is a sign of a sustained rally, so ideally spot buying needs to persist.

In terms of the Binance open interest and funding, Skew states that many shorts are chasing the price after the longs were squeezed earlier.

Outlook For H2 2023

Another bullish impact on the market could be the technical chart outlook for the second half of the year. As Aksel Kibar, Chartered Market Technician (CMT), via Twitter, BTC could be on the verge of a breakout from the correction that has been taking place since mid-April:

Looks like we have a valid downward sloping channel on $BTCUSD with the upper boundary acting as short-term resistance at 27K. Breakout from the channel can complete the existing pullback to the larger scale H&S bottom reversal.