Trending Bitcoin News and Market Sentiment February 1st, 2020: Ethereum Miners at Record Holdings, Bitcoin $100K Bull Run Has Arrived

• After some sell offs, Bitcoin recorded a daily high so far at USD 9,451 and looks set to stay in this range
• Ethereum miners are approaching record levels of ETH holdings in cumulative pool totals as ETH price climbs above $180
• Crypto analysts have declared the USD 100,000 Bitcoin bull run officially here

 

It ended up as a nervy Friday after all, with a daily low of USD 9,198 for a moment breaking the USD 9,200 support level, but bulls rallied to ensure that Bitcoin would trade on Saturday in the good zone, with price trading at a daily high so far of USD 9,451 a few hours ago (CoinDesk).

Altcoins fared just as well, with Ripple (XRP) going back towards 24 cents, Ethereum (ETH) moving back above USD 180 and many others regaining the heights of the previous week in the absence of a sustained sell off.

February is a historically positive time for Bitcoin and it does look like the buyers are determined to make sure things stay that way in 2020. The popular narrative is down to Chinese investors seeing off a good Lunar New Year, but with that happening weeks ago already and the health fears in mainland China, the current rally is instead attributed to panic in traditional stock markets and a desire to spread risk out to digital assets.

If Bitcoin mining is at an all time high in terms of hash rate, we should note also that Ethereum miners are currently making new records of holdings in ETH as well, and some analysts believe this to be a marker of confidence in the world’s biggest smart contract platform.

ETH mining pools are nearing the all time high set in October 2019 when they held 1.69 million ETH, and crypto analysts Santiment says that the rise from 1.64 million November low had been steady and stable, which is positive news for ETH holders. Santiment founder Maksim Balashevich noted in Spencer Noon’s Substack newsletter:

“These periods of accumulation tend to suggest high confidence levels in the project among the majority block creators, at the very least relative to the current market conditions. On the other hand, major miner sell-offs have often been followed by quick and significant price corrections historically.”

Compared to a year ago, ETH’s cumulative balance in all mining pools have jumped 11%, and notably increased in four months to October 2019 when price slipped from USD 366 to current levels. It makes sense that miners are willing to accumulate and hold in such low prices, as markets have decidedly turned bullish when ETH rallied 120% in the first six months, while dips are taken to be only temporary corrections in bull market medium terms.

When price did not recover, most miners liquidated in late October around USD 170 which caused the drop in holdings, says Balashevich. Nevertheless, mining profitability is at a good level and miners are basically only selling to make up for operational costs, so long term, ETH is pretty bullish coming up to Ethereum 2.0 improvements.

Bitcoin, of course, still takes the best news of the day, with a crypto influencer happily declaring that the USD 100,000 bull run has finally arrived.

In a Market Discussion yesterday, YouTube bloggers Carl Runefelt and Nicholas Merten — better known by their respective aliases TheMoon and DataDash — said that in fact, the world’s largest digital asset by market capitalization had already been in a bull market for a while.

They are only the latest to finally say that the bullish sentiment is true, on the back of Bitcoin being the best major investment opportunity for 2020 way ahead of gold. Tesla stocks don’t count, by the way, since not everyone is able to access that opportunity!

But the analysts do admit that timeframes are very important when deciding if a bull trajectory was indeed here, even if they were firmly of the opinion that a six-digit US dollar valuation was well on its way. Mertens said the next bull cycle would be aiming at least USD 80,000 if not the full six-digit figure:

“Until we get to $20,000, we’re not going to see the parabolic run that we’ve seen in previous cycles, like when we went from $1,000 to $20,000 in 2017… That’s really what I define as a key bull market for cryptocurrencies, but we’re trading higher… we’re going for higher highs and higher lows, those are all positive signs.”

 

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Solution to Blockchain Scalability Problem Proposed by Ex-Microsoft Worker

• A public blockchain project called Asensys, led by an ex-Microsoft employee, has been proposed as a solution to the scalability issue of blockchain.

A former Microsoft researcher has claimed to have solved the blockchain scalability problem. Asensys, a public blockchain project led by JiaPing Wang, unveiled their website 11 months after presenting the concept of a blockchain which is scalable. The Asensys protocol created by the researchers has shown more capacity than Bitcoin and Ethereum.

When asked how they were able to achieve this, Wang said:

“Asensys is able to essentially ‘divide and conquer’ all network actions, thereby reducing unnecessary redundancy.”

The Scalability trilemma refers to the problem of not blockchain not being decentralized, secure and scalable at the same time. An increase in volume has often compromised one of the other aspects. To get around this problem, Ethereum and Buterin have been working on something known as sharding, which essentially means the Ethereum nodes will process a transaction only partially. Bitcoin developers, on the other hand, have come up with solutions such as Lightning which records certain transactions off-chain.

Asensys, however, has come up with a solution that involves neither sharding nor Lightning. A conference paper termed “Monoxide: Scale out blockchains with asynchronous consensus zones” suggests the creation of various ‘zones’ within the network which will work independently and asynchronously to remove the duplication of efforts built into blockchains and instead spread the workload around.

 

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Bitcoin Price and Technical Market Analysis January 31st, 2020

• Sellers’ attempt to change the situation by testing the mark $9120 failed.

• Buyers continue to fix over $9050-9350.

• Targets for February $10,500 and $13,070 remain unchanged.

Yesterday’s trading on Bitcoin market ended with an update of the local high and exit from the range $9050-9350. As the end of the month approaches, buyers continue to strengthen their positions in the market. Bitcoin price growth was over 2% yesterday. Considering the daily candle from 28 January, where buyers were able to raise the price by more than 5% and use the same volumes as yesterday, yesterday’s growth was weaker. Sellers still decided to turn the situation in their favor. So far, it looks local, so let’s move to the hourly timeframe:

Sellers tried to break local consolidation down by organizing a false breakdown to the mark $9120. Thus, buyers who were buying on Bitcoin market in the limits of consolidation, were forced to sell their bitcoins through stop orders. Most of buyers did not respond to the provocation. The price updated a new high on increased volumes. Now, sellers are testing the broken range. As we can see by the nature of the fall, they are not relying on a counterattack. Given these facts, the continuation of growth to $10,500 is probable scenario and a foothold for a successful February growth are laid.

Buyers have been actively increasing their marginal positions yesterday. It shows their good humor and belief in Bitcoin price growth continuation:

It is also interesting that sellers are trying to keep up with buyers by increasing their marginal positions yesterday as well:

Looking closely at when buyers began to actively increase their positions, we begin to understand. It was during the test of $9120 and a sharp counter-attack of buyers. Sellers actively increased their marginal positions for 5 hours with updating the local high. This fact is not yet clear, as the seller’s support is now under the control of buyers and the next support is near the mark $10,500.

According to the wave analysis, we can see that the wave of growth since 18 December corrected the fall from July 2019 by 50%:

In fact, now buyers have stopped at this mark. If the situation with Bitcoin price remains constant, then next week buyers will surely prove the definitive change of the falling trend and the beginning of a new trend of growth. Next month’s targets $10,500 and $13,070 remain unchanged.

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Ethereum Dev Virgil Griffith Pleads Not Guilty in North Korea Case

Former Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy charges filed against him by the US Attorney’s office in relation to a speech he gave at a blockchain conference in North Korea in April 2019.

Griffith was arrested on Thanksgiving at Los Angeles International Airport after the FBI alleged that he breached the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in traveling to North Korea without authorization and providing knowledge on how the country can utilize blockchain technology to launder money and evade sanctions. Earlier this month, the former Ethereum employee was indicted by Grand ...

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Ethereum Price and Technical Market Analysis January 31st, 2020

• Buyers managed to test the global price zone $180-190.

• The critical point of the local growth trend is around $177.

• In case Ethereum price will fix above $190, the next target is $220.

Yesterday’s trading day on Ethereum market was marked by a test of a critical price zone $180-190. Buyers were able to upgrade a local high at the mark $186.75. The dayily candle closed with a small pin, but it looks pretty confident. Yesterday’s trading volumes were increased, which indicates the efforts of buyers and the belief in the growth continuation. Today, sellers need to show their reaction to the critical range test. So far, we see a rather passive decrease of Ethereum price at the 4-hour timeframe:

Sellers’ disinterest in counter-attack completely unlocks buyers. In this case, after continuation of consolidation, buyers will be able to continue building the upward trend aggressively. However, given the importance of this price zone and the previous experience of buyers in attempt to break it, we are not sure that its breakdown will happen immediately and in the short term. Last time, buyers spent more than a month and made two attempts to fix above this price range. And the result was a failure. The critical point of the current growing trend has shifted from $166 to $177.

Today, will complete its formation monthly candle, which looks quite promising. For a month, buyers were able to break sellers’ achievements during the previous two months, giving them a chance to continue their growth in Ethereum market:

Yesterday, buyers very actively increased their marginal positions:

However, the mood of sellers is not the same as that of buyers. Yesterday, some of the sellers actively increased their marginal positions, while some of them reduced, forming a considerable pin on the candle:

According to the wave analysis, buyers passed the first barrier in the form of Fibonacci level 0.382. Now, Ethereum price has stopped near the second barrier:

In case of successfully fixing above the mark $190, buyers have the prospect of continued growth with a first stop $220. Let’s meet on Sunday and fix the fact of the monthly candle closure and the main and alternative scenario of the price movement in February.

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Trending Bitcoin News and Market Sentiment January 31st, 2020: Crypto Loan Facilities in Great Demand Thanks to Rising Interest from Institutional Investors

• Bitcoin touched a new monthly and yearly high at USD 9,633 during early Asian trading on Friday
• The crypto loaning industry is growing at an ever-increasing rate, with demand from institutional investors fueling the rise of crypto lending platforms

 

Bitcoin bulls are having a good day, registering a high at the start of Asian trading hours in Beijing at USD 9,633 (CoinDesk), although momentum has been petering out since then, but consolidation is at a very health USD 9,325 at the moment.

If the scenario where Bitcoin stays above USD 9,000 continues for a few more days, then Bitcoin will have resisted that breakdown for the three or four days that many analysts are asking for to prove that bullish turn in on the way.

The Bitcoin rally has been starkly contrasting with not-so-good results in the stockmarkets. The US economy also does not seem to be willing to get excited, and US banks like JPMorgan Chase are reportedly finding it hard to achieve fast loan growth, even with interest rates very close to all-time lows.

Lending is, however, on the uptrend in the crypto industry.

Compared to only a 2.1% rise in the last quarter for US GDP and other lukewarm numbers reported elsewhere, crypto lenders have been seeing a boom in the last quarter in terms of lending activity

Genesis, for example, that lends cash and crypto, said that loans jumped a massive 21% during the last quarter to USD 545 million, thanks to incredible demand from wealthy investors as well as Asian and European small loan aggregators.

JPMorgan was only able to achieve a 2% growth, keeping in line more or less with the growth of US economy. Lending is a smaller circle in the digital asset market, and they still face down big competition from established banks for loans to crypto traders and businesses. This is because regulators are still employing a strict policy for risk management, and crypto is still deemed to be highly volatile, and therefore, not suitable to be loan collaterals for traditional lenders.

This does mean opportunity for crypto lenders, who are receiving a lot of demand in Bitcoin and stablecoin denominated loans. As such, investors are lining up to put up cash collateral to lenders like Genesis in exchange for interest rates as high as 8%.

Galaxy Digital and Winklevoss Capital have backed crypto lender BlockFi, who will be adding five to 10 new assets to its platform, including Lirecoin and USD Coin, and will follow it up this year with a credit card to offer Bitcoin rewards. Digital asset lender Celsius Network told CoinDesk that institutional clients were driving growth behind loan platforms:

“Obviously the crypto sector is not even a beauty mark right now compared with the banking sector, in terms of the size and maturity,” Genesis CEO Michael Moro said in a phone interview. “But there is rapid growth in this new market, and it’s not just us. There are other companies trying to accomplish similar things.”

As of last month, the entire industry of crypto loaning was estimated by Blockchain analysis firm Graychain Ltd to be worth at least USD 4.7 billion. And this isn’t even taking into account the number of platforms that have been mushrooming since.

So far, lenders have apparently roped in interest to the tune of USD 86 million since 2018, but the demand for more loans has been growing, with over 5,400 loans issued in Q1 2019, compared to more than three times that the following quarter. Volume is also climbing, with USD 64.8 million loaned out in Q1 2019 almost tripling to USD 159.3 million the following quarter.

Historical performance of #BITCOIN against #EURO:
first price:97.0
last price:8370.0
EARNINGS:8528.87%
3.65% per day
25.58% per week
109.64% per month
1315.73% per year
PERIOD:
6.48 years
77.79 months
333.37 weeks
2333.61 days#BTC #BLOCKCHAIN #CRYPTOCURRENCY #digitalmine

— digital mine ⚡🤖👨‍💻🇭🇰🇹🇼 (@digital_mine_) January 31, 2020

In any case, all eyes now turn to Great Britain as they enjoy their final day of membership in the European Union. While the effects on the pound sterling are certain to be pronounced, will the uncertainty and fear in that region cause demand for Bitcoin to go up even higher? Only time will tell, as we like to say!

 

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Bitcoin Futures CME Trading Generates $100 Billion in Volume Since 2017

One of the products that have become particularly important to the continued growth of the crypto industry is Bitcoin futures. The derivative product has become one of the most heavily traded crypto-based securities.

Key Drivers

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) revealed its actual figures with regard to this particular product yesterday. The futures contracts have been traded on the exchange since 2017, and one of the top executives revealed that the total volume of the trades has been pegged at $100 billion.

Tim McCourt, who is the Global Head of Equity Index Alternative Investment ...

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