Critical Bitcoin Price Warning as BTC Consolidation Nears an End

TL;DRBack to Ghost Town?CryptoQuant’s take on the matter indicates that the active addresses on the world’s largest blockchain have failed to recover after the massive drop experienced in late March and early April when the underlying asset slumped below $75,000 amid Trump’s tariff threats. Although the price has recovered and even managed to break the previous ATH, the retail interactions haveremained minimal, with few signs of improvement.The network activity index, which shows the overall usage of Bitcoin’s blockchain by combining factors like active addresses, transaction counts, total UTXOs, and number of bytes per block, has also remained low, CQ’s CryptoMe said.Lastly, the analyst brought up the BTC mempool, which shows very few pending transactions.“Sometimes, the mempool can be low because of technologies like SegWit or batching. But when we also see a drop in Active Addresses and low Network Activity, it clearly shows that the reason is a lack of interest.”This is far from the first such occasion this year. The network activityslumpedin early February as well, and the price followed suit, which showed a clear correlation between the two.Retail Not Needed?The fact that the network activity is low can be concerning. However, there’s also the opposite view on the matter. As mentioned above, BTC already managed to recover after a steep pullback and tap a new record while the activity remained low.At the same time, reports emerged that this impressive rally that drove the cryptocurrency from under $75,000 to over $110,000 was primarily driven by institutions accumulating the asset via ETFs or OTC deals.Consequently, this raises the question whether retail is indeed necessary for BTC’s price to head north once again. They were needed during past cycles, but times have changed, and Bitcoin is a globally recognized asset now that attracts a different class of investors, not only the retail crowd that came when it was pumping and disappeared when the bear markets took over.