This Week In Crypto is a weekly segment from the Live Coin Watch News team, providing readers with a fun, succinct, and pertinent summary of the most important Bitcoin-related events in the past week or two.
Bitcoin Plunges Under $9,000; Crypto Market Outlook Worsens
The past few weeks haven’t been kind to the crypto market. After hitting a weekly high of $10,300 the weekend before last, the price of BTC fell by almost 10% in three hours, hitting $9,250 on some exchanges, then as low as $8,400 this past weekend. This extended drop liquidated hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto positions on margin exchanges. Ouch. This move has made many wonder if the cryptocurrency market is going to return to a bearish trend.
Despite these fears, the crypto market saw an extremely positive sign this week: a golden cross that formed on the one-day Bitcoin chart. For those unaware, a golden cross is when an asset’s 50-day simple moving average crosses above the 200-day simple moving average, suggesting that bulls decisively have the upper hand over bears. Previous golden crosses in the cryptocurrency led to extremely strong price action: the Bitcoin golden cross in 2012 led to a 20,578% explosion higher, and the golden cross in 2015 preceded a 6,739% move to the upside that took BTC to $20,000.
Ripple Sponsors Ethereum Event: What?
In a blog post published the Friday before last, Warren Paul Anderson, a part of the Product and Developer Relations team at Ripple, revealed his team’s intent to “build bridges” with Ethereum, a competing crypto project as many readers are aware of. It did so by attending ETH Denver. Xpring, the initiative from Ripple to spark the integration of fintech into applications, sponsored the event. The reason: Xpring wanted to help “combine efforts, pool resources and work together where appropriate to make it easier for developers to BUIDL on blockchain [and with crypto].”
Anderson further explained:
We think the XRP to ETH and ERC-20 tokens bridge is important since XRP is one of the most liquid crypto currencies in the world, but doesn’t have a compute layer to support complex smart contracts for the growing Decentralized Finance (DeFi) market on Ethereum.
Coronavirus Could Bring On China’s Crypto
Per an article from China Daily — a newspaper owned by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China — Lihui Li, a former president of the Bank of China, said that the coronavirus epidemic unfolding will likely accelerate a national digital currency or national crypto. Li purportedly added that a digital currency from the PBOC is likely to benefit retail businesses by decreasing costs and increasing the efficiency of transactions.
This was echoed by Fan Yifei, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China. He said at a news conference held on Saturday that the central bank is going to accelerate its work in the mobile payment field. Sources within the Chinese government, however, have contradicted this, arguing that the coronavirus outbreak has actually forced institutions in the government to shutter or slow operations, thus affecting the development of the state cryptocurrency.
Crypto Pioneer Vitalik Buterin Optimistic About Ethereum 2.0
Vitalik Buterin, the original creator of the blockchain, recently confirmed that the development of Ethereum 2.0 (or Serenity) is going on well. Buterin, during his speech at a recent event mentioned his thoughts on Ethereum 2.0, expressing optimism about the timeline for this blockchain upgrade, which will likely be the biggest upgrade or change made to any blockchain system,
ever:
[I] definitely think ETH2.0 has been proceeding quite quickly and regularly in the last few months.
A member of the team researching and developing ETH 2.0, Justin Drake, wrote in a recent Reddit “Ask me Anything” regarding Ethereum that he has “95% confidence we launch in 2020.”
Article Produced By
Nick Chong
TP
