Bitcoin Held Near $28,000 After the March Jobs Report

Bitcoin held close to $28,000 on April 7, 2023 after the U.S. employment report showed continued job growth and reinforced expectations that the Federal Reserve could raise interest rates again in May.

Coinbase Exchange’s BTC-USD market opened the UTC session at $28,052.74 and closed it at $27,931.94. That $120.80 difference was a 0.43% decline, calculated from the opening price. Bitcoin’s limited response mattered because the labor figures strengthened the case for maintaining restrictive monetary policy, ordinarily a difficult backdrop for speculative assets, without dislodging the cryptocurrency from the range it had occupied for much of the preceding week.

The result was evidence of market stability, not proof that bitcoin had become insensitive to interest rates or economic conditions.

A restrained response to firm employment data

At 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time on April 7, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics initially estimated that nonfarm payroll employment increased by 236,000 in March. The unemployment rate changed little at 3.5%, while labor-force participation reached 62.6%.

Average hourly earnings increased 0.3% during March and 4.2% over the preceding 12 months. BLS also reported that the average workweek edged down by 0.1 hour to 34.4 hours. Together, the figures described a labor market that was cooling from its earlier pace but remained strong enough to sustain concern about inflation and another Federal Reserve rate increase.

Contemporaneous Reuters reporting said economists in its survey had expected 239,000 additional jobs. Reuters also reported that Treasury yields and the dollar rose after the release as traders increased the probability they assigned to another rate increase. That was an event-day market interpretation, not a Federal Reserve commitment or decision.

Bitcoin traded between $27,790.21 and $28,120.71 during the April 7 UTC session on Coinbase. The $330.50 high-to-low range equaled approximately 1.18% of the opening price. Coinbase reported 5,847.77 BTC of volume for BTC-USD, a figure limited to that pair and venue rather than the worldwide bitcoin market.

Ether followed the same narrow pattern

Coinbase’s ETH-USD market opened April 7 at $1,873.28 and closed at $1,865.02, a calculated decline of 0.44%. Ether traded from $1,842.25 to $1,883.35, with Coinbase reporting 59,267.02 ETH in volume.

A contemporaneous weekly market report captured a longer and differently timed comparison. At 9:15 p.m. in Hong Kong on April 7, Forkast placed bitcoin at $27,916, down 0.96% from March 31, while ether was $1,854, up 2.54% over the same stated interval. Those observations are snapshots, not universal closing prices, and should not be substituted for Coinbase’s complete UTC candles.

Ether’s relative weekly strength was also being assessed ahead of Ethereum’s scheduled Shanghai-Capella upgrade on April 12. On April 7, however, withdrawals had not yet activated. Expectations about the upgrade belonged to the market context; its later operation could not yet be treated as established fact.

Why the quiet session mattered

U.S. stock exchanges were closed for Good Friday, while cryptocurrency markets continued operating. Bitcoin therefore supplied a continuously traded reaction to the employment release during a session with fewer conventional risk-market reference points.

The defensible conclusion is narrow. Firm labor data pushed yields and the dollar higher and kept another rate increase in view, while bitcoin and ether finished their Coinbase UTC sessions less than one-half of one percent below their openings. Price timing supports a macroeconomic interpretation, but it cannot establish why individual traders bought or sold.

Crypto has no consolidated closing auction. Results can differ by exchange, currency pair, liquidity, aggregation method and timezone, and the cited volumes do not represent the entire market.