A month ago, the cryptocurrency market was shocked as bitcoin dropped below $35,000. Currently, the asset is trading around $44,000, and investors have resumed active trading in the digital coin. Despite this fact, the cryptocurrency community is confident that 2022 will be a challenging year for the cryptocurrency industry. Apart from widespread regulation of local markets by states, investors are concerned about the Fed's policy.

The biggest increase in inflation in 30 years has forced the Fed to roll back its stimulus program. The regulator is also planning to raise its key interest rate to reduce inflation. Stock markets had expected such a statement from the Fed, however, reacted by falling.

The Fed's next meeting and first rate hike is scheduled for spring 2022. This suggests that risky assets have little time to recover. The Fed's policy tightening will provoke an outflow of investment from high-risk industries and increase volatility.

A similar view was expressed by CEO of Prosper Trading Academy Scott Bauer. The entrepreneur believes that bitcoin's price movement will depend on the US monetary policy and inflation growth. However, Bauer rules out that the cryptocurrency will manage to reach a new all-time record and will fluctuate within the range of $30,000-$50,000 in 2022.

If Bauer's position is considered from a technical point of view, cryptocurrency's weekly time frame can be analyzed. On the 1W chart, the upward trend of BTC/USD quotes movement is broken. Moreover, the RSI technical indicator is at 46 points, indicating a bear market. For example, let's compare the index during the bull market in 2017. At that time, the metric did not fall below 60, which corresponds to a bullish trend.

This assumption may be true if the cryptocurrency has completed a five-wave growth pattern. In that case, the current bull cycle has already set a historical high at $69,000. Besides, bitcoin's recovery movement can be considered a common flat movement over a wide range of $30,000-$50,000.

Experts at JPMorgan expressed a similar view, based on the fact that bitcoin has become closer to classic financial instruments. The bank's officials cited the drop in BTC quotes following the NASDAQ and SPX as evidence of dependence on technology companies. The increased correlation with these indices makes cryptocurrency more sensitive to the Fed's policy and risky investments. Therefore, JPMorgan believes that the cryptocurrency industry and specifically bitcoin will face periods of increased volatility due to monetary policy normalization.

Despite pessimistic forecasts, BTC is likely to be within a recovery period and a formation of the final fifth wave of growth. This scenario is relevant in case the fourth bearish wave had a complex two-level corrective structure. The positive scenario is confirmed by statistical data. Santiment reported that addresses with balances from 1000 BTC had accumulated 220,000 digital coins during 1.5 months of correction. The cryptocurrency's hashrate is setting new performance records, and large companies are accumulating investment volumes.

Moreover, the figures of technical analysis indicate the potential of BTC price movement at least to the area of $56,000. The number of active addresses continues to grow and the number of coins held by "weak hands" has reached a minimum, which suggests that the probability of panic selling is decreasing. All these factors indicate that the major cryptocurrency will manage to set a new historical record before the next Fed meeting.