Cryptos weekly market analysis
We report the usual weekly crypto market analysis on the last trading sessions based on Aayush Jindal (Cryptonews.com).
In the past two trading sessions, bitcoin price followed a bullish path above the $ 9,000 resistance level. It is showing positive signs above 9,050 and it may soon rise above 9,120 and 9,180.
Upside: The first major resistance is near the 9,240, above which the bulls are likely to test the 9,350 resistance area.
Downside: the previous resistance near 9,000 may perhaps provide support. The main support is near 8,850, below which the price might slide towards 8,650.
Ethereum price gained bullish momentum and surpassed the $ 230 and $ 232 resistance levels. It is trading near the 235 resistance level.
Upside: any further gains could lead the pair towards 250 in the coming sessions.
Downside: If the price fails to continue higher, it could correct lower and revisit the 230 support area. The main support is near 225.
Bitcoin cash price is climbing steadily above the $ 330 level. It is up around +4.0% and it is now trading above 340.
Upside: An immediate resistance is near 350, above which there are chances of a strong rise towards 380.
Downside: A short term pullback might find bids near 330 and 325.
Litecoin regained strength and climbed above the $ 62.5 resistance level. It seems like it could continue to rise and the next stop for the bulls might be 64.5 or 65.0. On the downside, the bulls are likely to remain active near 61.2 and 60.0.
XRP price maintained a bullish bias and traded above the $ 0.238 resistance level. The price tested 0.242 and it is might continue to grind higher. The next major resistance is near 0.245, above which the bulls are likely to aim a test of 0.255.
In the past three sessions, many small-capitalization altcoins gained more than +5.0%, including HBAR, ABBC, WAVES, WICC, LRC, ICX, HC, WAXP, KNC, REN, LSK, DX and BTG. Out of these, HBAR rallied more than +30.0% and ABBC is up around +22.0%.
South Korean Parliament passes its first Crypto bill
The South Korean National Assembly has voted in favor of the country’s first cryptocurrency-specific legislation last week. As reported by Tim Alper (Cryptonews.com), “the amended Special Financial Transactions Information Act, which was approved by a National Assembly finance committee in November last year, will effectively create a framework for the country’s cryptocurrency industry. The South Korean cryptocurrency industry has reacted positively to the news.
Simon Kim, the CEO of Seoul-based blockchain incubator Hashed, told Cryptonews.com, “There has been great uncertainty regarding regulations in cryptocurrency in South Korea until now. However, with the new law, cryptocurrency has been officially classified as an asset class by the institutions and virtual asset operators are able to operate under proper law in Korea. I believe this is a strong, positive signal for South Korea moving forward and proving itself as the perfect testbed for blockchain and cryptocurrency on the global scene.”
IT journalist Janet Cho told Cryptonews.com, “All of the big South Korean companies involved in blockchain have been championing this amendment, and now they’ve got exactly what they wanted. The ball’s now in their court. How they, and other companies that have possibly been keeping their cryptocurrency plans secret, react in the next few weeks and months will be very telling indeed.”
Blockchain consultant Mira Kim also spoke to Cryptonews.com, saying, “This is great news. OK, nobody will actually welcome taxes and regulations, but a lack of legitimacy is what was holding investors and big companies back. In a year, that will be gone. Now it’s a fair fight against the conventional finance industry. Game on!”
The crypto-specific portions of the bill are largely based on the G7’s FATF guidelines about how governments should police what it terms as virtual asset service providers – namely crypto exchanges and brokerages.”
How Bitcoin market changed since 2017
Although the bitcoin market’s recent volatility is familiar to industry veterans, the circumstances are very different in 2020 than they were when the crypto surged to nearly $20,000 in late 2017.
Leigh Cuen (Coindesk.com), thinks that “namely, there’s now Wall Street infrastructure for sophisticated bitcoin trading and holding, from Fidelity Investments to Bakkt. The brokerage startup Tagomi also offers institutional investors the options for trading between platforms without moving the price. Until recently, limited price spreads restricted market activity.
These days, over in San Francisco, deliberately conservative exchanges like the bitcoin-focused startup River Financial have attracted talent such as UBS alum Zev Mintz, who said the combination of a robust lending market with margin trading will be a “huge driver” of liquidity in 2020, as well as the growing “payments system” use case.
Indeed, merchant adoption remains modest yet consistent, according to Coinbase. OKEx’s Lennix Lai said derivatives now make up nearly 66% of the platform’s daily global volume, more than $2 billion in options alone. Yet, it’s not the sheer number of trading platforms that differentiates this prospective bull run. Incumbents like BitMEX and Binance continue to churn volumes that dwarf those of OKEx. “We were getting questions all the time about what can we do, can we buy bitcoin?” Mintz said of his former clients at UBS. “A lot of what I’m going to be doing in the next year [at River Financial] is building on some of these [dollar-cost-averaging] tools, giving users more insights and analytics into how their holdings are working and being as transparent as possible.”
These days, Campbell says, it’s easier to give more accurate price information from a variety of exchange platforms, in addition to “better ways for people to margin for shorts and lends.”
“The over-the-counter market has changed a lot. … It was really a couple of guys pressing ‘buy’ behind the scenes,” she said, comparing 2017 to 2020. “It’s moved from a dealer-driven market to one where people know how to execute trades through a prime broker, using algorithms or other strategies.”
It’s the presence of both Wild West options and regulator-friendly alternatives that differentiates 2020. It’s cheaper now than it’s ever been to move large bitcoin trades in and out of a market. By spreading trades across exchanges, institutional buyers avoid tipping the scales against their trades on platforms with limited spreads.
“A lot of the trading strategies that were too expensive before are now possible,” said Tagomi’s Campbell. “A lot of the strategies before were just arbitraging between exchanges, but that very quickly got subpoenaed away.” Tagomi’s warm relations with companies like Facebook and Bakkt suggest the long-prophesied arrival of institutional investors, which bitcoin advocates claimed in previous years would boost bitcoin prices “to the moon,” may have already started as a whisper, not a bang. For example, Lai estimated that 1% of OKEx’s clients in 2020 are the institutional traders that drive nearly 70% of the platform’s volumes.
The 2017 bitcoin market was retail driven. The cryptocurrency market, in general, may still be predominantly retail but bitcoin is much less so than before. OKEx’s Lai explained the appeal of bitcoin derivatives, trusting a company for traditional guarantees, attracts buyers who aren’t yet comfortable with independent custody of bitcoin itself. This can be especially true in emerging markets like India, where the Supreme Court recently ruled banks can work with crypto businesses and the demand for derivatives is surging. “Because the volatility of bitcoin is particularly higher than a regular asset class,” Lai said. “Traders feel more safe that way, they deposit a lot more money.”
If bitcoin doesn’t become a mass-market product, then investor interest may eventually simmer down. Still, it looks as though institutions around the world now routinely trade millions of dollars worth of bitcoin every day. That’s no longer a rare “whale call,” it’s the status quo.
“Those are the two components that are really important,” Mintz said, regarding how institutional interest and retail usage must coincide to drive demand beyond speculative trading. Institutions can now choose whether to trade bitcoin itself or representative options, both at scale.
“When you’re shorting on our platform, you’re actually borrowing bitcoin from someone else,” Tagomi’s Campbell added. “There’s physical bitcoin being exchanged. The same thing with margins … it’s all backed by physical assets, which is very different than trading futures [in 2017].”