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Last week, the BTC/USD pair reached its highest values since June last year in the area of 25250.00, but then returned to the 24500.00 mark, which is now trading.

There were no serious fundamental reasons for the strengthening of BTC positions, so most experts believe that it was caused by speculative operations. In particular, on February 15, one of the large funds made an acquisition of cryptocurrency worth about 1.0B dollars, which could push the quotes up. Nevertheless, two main long-term negative factors, the monetary policy of the US Fed and the pressure of US regulators, which can lead digital assets to a new decline, still persist.

The latest data on inflation in the USA confirmed the too slow pace of its decline, which finally convinced investors that in the near future the cycle of interest rate increases will not be completed, which will lead to further strengthening of the position of the US currency in relation to alternative assets. On the other hand, US regulators are increasing pressure on the cryptocurrency sector, trying to prevent a repeat of the situation with the FTX exchange and the loss of investors' investments. Currently, the main attention of officials is focused on the activities of cryptocurrency exchanges, which are systematically persecuted. In the middle of the month, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accused the Kraken digital platform of selling a staking program unregistered by the regulator to customers and forced it to pay a fine of 30.0M dollars. Also last week, the Binance exchange was attacked again, although it was done through Paxos, the issuer of the Pax Dollar (USDP) and Binance USD (BUSD) stablecoins. The New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) accused Paxos of insufficient control over its products and the possibility of their use by attackers. As a result, the issue of USDP and BUSD was stopped, but their turnover is still maintained. The consequence of these decisions has already been the termination of Paxos' work on the creation of a stablecoin for PayPal Holdings Inc. and the severance of relations with Binance. The management of the crypto exchange, according to Bloomberg, is considering the possibility of terminating cooperation with all partners from the USA and even completely leaving the American market. Experts believe that the situation could be much more dangerous for the entire digital sector if the authorities decide to freeze or confiscate assets that link BUSD to the dollar. In this case, the world's largest digital trading platform can expect bankruptcy.

In general, the market situation remains difficult, while investors' short-term optimism prevails, however, the actions of the US authorities may push prices down at any moment.      

Technically, the key for the "bulls" remains the level of 25000.00 (Murray level [8/8]), consolidation above which will cause continued growth to the levels of 26562.50 (Murray level [+1/8]) and 27400.00 (Fibo retracement 38.2%). In case of a breakdown of the level of 23000.00 (the middle line of the Bollinger Bands, Fibo retracement 23.6%), the decline will be able to resume to the levels of 21000.00, 20312.50 (Murray level [5/8]).

Technical indicators do not give a single signal: an upward reversal of the Bollinger Bands and an increase in the MACD histogram in the positive zone indicate the continuation of a short-term upward trend, but the Stochastic leaves the overbought zone, which does not exclude a decline.

Resistance levels: 25000.00, 26562.50, 27400.00. | Support levels: 23000.00, 21000.00, 20312.50.