Despite recent price rises for bitcoin and ether (perhaps fueled by President Trump and the Fed), Glassnode believes that there are no signs of a bear market trend reversal.

The analytics resource mentioned the low transaction fees, and the absence of active addresses.

Recent BTC pumps were fake?

Following several consecutive weeks of price slumps, bitcoin finally regained some ground last week and charted a 6-week high above $24,500. This came shortly after the US Federal Reserve increased the interest rates by 75 basis points, and the nation’s president – Joe Biden – refused to admit the country had entered into a recession, despite the negative GDP quarters.

However, the asset failed to continue upwards and retraced to below $23,000 earlier today. In its latest report on the market state, Glassnode attributed the decline to the relatively low network usage.

This is apparent in the network fees. They tend to rise when more users interact on the largest blockchain (typically during bull markets) and then fall back in bear markets. Glassnode acknowledged that there has not been a significant increase in fees .”

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The company also reaffirmed their stance after examining the current network activity. It shows “little new demand” with the exception of a few spikes during major capitulation events.

Ethereum Prices Suggest the Similar

The Ethereum situation looks very similar if one uses the fees and network congestion to determine the asset’s short-term price performance.

As CryptoPotato reported yesterday, the gas fees paid on the second-largest blockchain have dropped to multi-month lows, with the average price being under $5.

This causes problems for native cryptocurrency. This is because the EIP-1559, implemented with the London hard fork last year, cannot burn enough ETH due to a lack of network usage. The cryptocurrency is now highly inflationary.

However, the ETH community hopes that this will change soon since the Merge is expected to take place within the next few months.