The price of digital gold closed last week at $20,700, showing an increase of 8.4%. The growth engine of the main digital asset and the cryptocurrency market as a whole was a tangible strengthening of the American stock indices.

Thus, in one trading session on Friday, the stock index The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 2.59%, S&P 500 increased by 2.46%, and the NASDAQ Composite - by 2.87%.

By the way, since the beginning of 2022, analysts are increasingly drawing attention to the high level of correlation between the US securities market and virtual assets against the backdrop of a general tense expectation of the consequences of the geopolitical conflict in Eastern Europe and further steps by the US Federal Reserve.

Earlier, experts of the investment company Arcane Research have already stated that the correlation of BTC and technology securities has reached its maximum since July 2020.

The day before, the economists of the analytical platform TradingView also reported that the relationship between the cryptocurrency and the US stock markets reached 70% in the last quarter.

At the time of writing, digital gold is trading at $20,752.

Bitcoin's main competitor, Ethereum, also closed the trading week with growth, soaring by 18.07% over the past week. The value of the altcoin reached $1,583 at the time of writing, despite the fact that over the past day its value has decreased by 3.23%.

As for the top 10 cryptocurrencies by capitalization, all coins except XRP traded in the green zone last week. At the same time, the worst results were demonstrated by XRP (-1%), and the best ones - by DOGE (+95%), SOL (+17.7%), ADA (+15.9%) and BNB (+13%).

Throughout the past week, the attention of crypto enthusiasts was riveted to the meme coin Dogecoin, which has grown by 95% over this period. Last Friday, the altcoin reached $0.1 for the first time since May of this year and took eighth place in the ranking of digital assets by capitalization, surpassing Cardano and Solana. At the time of writing, the cryptocurrency is trading at $0.117.

Over the past week, the capitalization of Dogecoin has almost doubled: from $8 billion to $15.54 billion.

The provocateur of such obvious enthusiasm in the virtual asset market for the umpteenth time was CEO of electric car manufacturer Tesla Elon Musk. Another short tweet from the billionaire posted on Thursday blew up the crypto market and allowed Musk's favorite coin to reach new price heights. In his account, the entrepreneur announced that the deal to buy Twitter is supposed to be closed by Friday.

On Friday, the world media broke the news that the founder of Tesla closed the acquisition of the company for $44 billion, and former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal left its headquarters.

Recall that the meme coin Dogecoin appeared in 2013, and the Shiba Inu dog was chosen as its symbol. The dizzying rise of the coin occurred in the past year after Elon Musk began to mention it in every possible way on his Twitter account. Since then, crypto enthusiasts have called DOGE "Musk's favorite cryptocurrency."

As of Monday morning, the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies exceeds $1 trillion, according to CoinGecko data.

Since last November, when this figure exceeded $3 trillion ($3.08 trillion),

Since November last year, when this figure exceeded the $3 trillion ($3.08 trillion) mark, it has decreased by more than three times.

Forecasts of crypto experts

The unpredictable behavior of the digital coin market in recent weeks gives rise to the most unexpected forecasts from analysts regarding its future prospects. Thus, for example, Raoul Pal, a popular crypto trader and leading expert at Rekt Capital, announced the day before that BTC would soar to new historical highs in the near future.

After analyzing the Bitcoin chart, Pal noted that since the beginning of October, the coin has undergone obvious changes. Thus, throughout the summer and September, the lowest price of the asset was $19,000, at the beginning of this month it was trading at a maximum of $20,000, and by mid-October it had fallen to $18,000.

At the same time, Bitcoin has shown fantastic performance over the past week, approaching a month and a half high of $21,000 in the moment. The analyst is confident that in the next six months or a year, the cryptocurrency market will begin to grow exponentially. Pal considers the key condition for this to be the absence of macroeconomic shocks, which have been strongly affecting global markets since the beginning of 2022.

The popular crypto trader Ton Weiss made an even more positive forecast for BTC the day before. According to the expert, in 2023 the cost of Bitcoin will reach a six-figure number.

Meanwhile, trader Michael van de Poppe suggested that in the next two to three weeks, the first cryptocurrency will break through to the price level of $30,000.

Analyst under the nickname TechDev also made a bullish outlook for BTC. As a key argument, he cites the high consolidation of the value of digital gold and the NASDAQ index, which peaked in April 2021.