After the success of April, which Bitcoin ended with 34% gains, the digital asset has been fairly flat so far this month. Currently, BTC/USD is trading over $9,300.

These price gains came while the major central banks have been busy printing money and total assets on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet increased by nearly 55% to $6.7 trillion in less than two months.

The price of #Bitcoin increased 0.60% from the end of February to the end of April amidst one of the most catastrophic economic events in history.

A store of value.

— Travis Kling (@Travis_Kling) May 1, 2020

According to Glassnode Network Index, which is high, the recent price action for bitcoin was backed by strong network fundamentals.

“Subindices increased steadily through April, but liquidity is trailing – leaving room for volatility. Increased growth in liquidity would build strong foundations for a bullish scenario.”

The current price action that has the flagship cryptocurrency range-bound could be a “bullish consolidation” or “re-accumulation,” as per IncomeSharks, crypto analyst adding,

“As long as our near range holds I'm pretty confident in this larger wedge breaking upwards towards $9,600. Still in a bull market until I see a reason that we aren't.”

Even bitcoin whales, entities that are holding over 1000 BTC, are also busy accumulating the digital asset. There are currently 1996 addresses with 1000-10,0000 BTC, as per Bitinfocharts. On-chain analyst Willy Woo said,

“Whale population spotted increasing in the wild. They've been in solid accumulation mode since January unperturbed by the COVID crash. This is macro bullish.”

Currently, despite the flat price, “volumes remain elevated, as if something is happening under the surface,” said analyst Mati Greenspan.

Though common for volumes to rise along with volatility, they tend to die down once the action is over.

Last week, on spot exchanges, volume exploded to over $4 billion and the real volume is currently around $1.2 billion. This solid boost has the daily volume, 7-day average once again above $2 billion.

On the institutional front, the open interest on CME has surged to a new yearly high, the highest level seen since the price peak in 2019. Bakkt’s bitcoin futures volume was also as high as $30.5 million on Thursday.

202 CME bitcoin options contracts traded yesterday, a new record in terms of $ notional

May20 10k and 11.5k calls traded in 100 lots, equivalent to 500 bitcoin options each pic.twitter.com/zBgTgTVWDe

— skew (@skewdotcom) May 6, 2020

Coming onto the bitcoin blockchain, things have started returning to normal. The estimated transaction value in USD spiked all the way up to $3.18 billion last week and then returned to normal levels.

Bitcoin has a good start of May, having breached $9,000 multiple times in less than a week.

$BTC just crossed the $9000 threshold for the 50th time in six days. Vegeta says he is getting tired.

— Alex (@classicmacro) May 5, 2020

As per Santiment’s NVT price prediction model for Bitcoin, it is showing a good semi bullish start to May. This indicates that the token circulation, the number of unique tokens being transacted at least once in a given day, is exceeding the average levels expected at bitcoin.

But the million-dollar question currently is how the bitcoin price will behave in these five days leading up to next week’s halving. Santiment noted,

“In general, prices tend to behave in the manner that the crowd least expects more often than not.”

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