Week of 12 April 2021: Bitcoin falls 6.4% while Ether gains 3.9%, a 10-point split
When Bitcoin and Ether move in opposite directions in the same week, what does the split reveal about relative positioning, and what can price and funding data alone not explain?
BTC fell from 59,998.8 to 56,150.01 (-6.41%) while ETH rose from 2,151.42 to 2,235.64 (+3.91%), a 10.32 percentage-point gap. The ETH/BTC ratio gained 11.04%. Both assets printed their weekly lows in the same hour, 03:00 UTC on Sunday 18 April, and both funding rates stayed positive all week.
What the data shows. The two majors split. BTC set its weekly high of 64,854 on Wednesday 14 April at 06:00 UTC and never recovered that level; its best day was Tuesday 13 April (+6.21%) and its worst was Sunday 18 April (-6.43%). ETH followed a different path, reaching its high of 2,548.29 only on Friday 16 April. BTC's weekly return ranked at the 16th percentile of the 165 weeks of history on this record, while ETH's ranked at the 59th. Volume ran above the prior twelve-week average for both (1.29 times for BTC, 1.19 times for ETH). The two still moved closely hour by hour (correlation 0.84), and both lows and both largest hourly moves landed in the same hour, 03:00 UTC on Sunday 18 April, when BTC fell 6.44% and ETH 4.23% in one hour. BTC closed 13.05% below its 52-week high, ETH 11.58% below.
What it does not show. The data records the divergence, not its cause. Nothing here identifies which flows drove ETH higher or BTC lower, or whether the split reflects one asset being bought or the other being sold. Hourly candles also cannot show what happened in the seconds around the Sunday hour, so the true size of that move may be larger than the hourly figure.
What a careful desk would check. Realised volatility, the size of the swings that actually happened scaled to a yearly figure, was 80.2% for BTC and 98.2% for ETH. The Sunday hour is the concrete test: both weekly lows and both largest hourly drops coincide in it, so stops and margin buffers set from the average week would have been tested in a single hour. BTC's close at 37.5% of its weekly range and ETH's at 48.0% put both in the middle third, meaning neither finished near its low.
Ether against Bitcoin. The ETH/BTC ratio rose 11.04% over the week, the clearest signal of the split. BTC had two up weeks and two down in the prior four (4.35%, 3.09%, -2.75%, -2.74%), so the divergence arrived after a mixed stretch rather than a sustained trend in one asset.
What would change this reading
- If the ETH/BTC ratio holds its 11.04% gain in later weeks, this week marks a genuine rotation; if it gives the gain back, the split reads as noise around a shared Sunday shock.
- If BTC trades below this week's low of 50,931.3, the 16th-percentile weekly return becomes a continuing decline rather than a pause near the highs.
- If funding stays at or above this week's averages (0.0884% for BTC, 0.1044% for ETH per eight hours) while prices stall, longs are paying a rising carry for positions that have stopped rising.
- If a later week shows BTC and ETH moving in the same direction again, the Sunday hour, where both lows coincided, reads as the shared event rather than the split.
Terms
- ETH/BTC ratio
- the price of one Ether expressed in Bitcoin; it rises when Ether outperforms Bitcoin
- funding rate
- the periodic payment between long and short holders of a perpetual futures contract; positive means longs pay shorts
- percentile
- where a week's value sits against all past weeks on the record; a low percentile means most past weeks were higher