Category: ambcrypto

Bitcoin [BTC/USD] Technical Analysis: Cryptocurrency stumbles on the bear speed-breaker again

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The cryptocurrency market’s downturn has been apparent with Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency on the planet, showing no signs of a bullish recovery. This fact was further evidenced when on January 31, the cryptocurrency witnessed another bearish drop, forcing it to stay below the $3,500-mark. Bitcoin [BTC] is not the only cryptocurrency showing a rampant bearish behavior with several of the top cryptocurrency displaying the same signs.
1-hour:

The one-hour graph shows the utter dominance of the bear as the chart only shows a sustained sideways movement with a significant bearish drop. The downtrend resulted in Bitcoin’s price falling from $3,549.94 to $3,405.28. The support has been holding at $3,358.99 while the immediate resistance is at $3,620.54.
The Chaikin Money Flow indicator has been fluctuating rapidly over an extended period of time. At the moment, the CMF is below the zero-line, which means that the capital leaving the market is more than the capital coming into the market.
The Bollinger band points to the start of a new outbreak leaning towards the bearish side. This was kick-started by Bitcoin’s sudden drop of more than $30.
1-day:

Bitcoin’s one-day graph is a typical example of the prices dwindling at a drastic rate. The price drop stands out starkly on the charts, with the downtrend bringing the price down from $6,288.13 to $3,488.9 while the long-term support remains at $3,164.59.
The Relative Strength Index has maintained just above the oversold zone after crashing below it, back in December. The RSI indicates that the selling pressure is significantly higher than the buying pressure.
The Awesome Oscillator displays a major lull as the graph is barely visible now compared to the surge before the start of the year. The dip means that the cryptocurrency market momentum is much lesser than it was before.
Conclusion:
The bear’s attack has played a significant role in changing the atmosphere of the cryptocurrency market. The strongest case for this is the massive layoff conducted by the NEM Foundation due to the XEM’s crash. The above-mentioned indicators all take the side of the bear, meaning it will be a long time before Bitcoin climbs out of its adversary’s pit.
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Bitcoin [BTC]’s scaling should be on second layer and privacy on the base layer, says Mastering Bitcoin author

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Andreas M Antonopoulos, the Author of Mastering Bitcoin and a well-known Bitcoin influencer, spoke about scalability problems of Bitcoin, during a Q&A session on Youtube. Here, the author was asked about Bitcoin’s scaling, taking into consideration that the debate surrounding the topic has been going on for nearly six years. This was then connected to Moore’s law, wherein the Andreas was asked about the computational speed and memory capacity increasing by a factor of 8x since the past six years if the law has held true.
The Bitcoin proponent also elucidated on whether decentralization would be compromised if the block size limit is increased and whether the average nodes can now handle an 8 MB block as easily as it could handle 1MB block back in 2013.
The author started by speaking about Moore’s law, wherein he stated:
“Moore’s law isn’t exactly a doubling every year it was at its peak an approximate doubling every 18 months. Furthermore we are already seeing the fact that Moore’s law has slowed down because in terms of pure increase of the number of transistors on a chip and increase of clock speeds”
He went on to say that the real problem is not storage and CPU capacity for validating blocks in decentralized open public cryptocurrencies and blockchain, but it is the network bandwidth and network latency. Andreas further added that Moore’s Law has not operated on network bandwidth as much as it has on CPUs and hard drive storage.
He stated that one of the big problems with network bandwidth is the ‘last mile’ problem.
“Yes, you can stuff a hundred times more into an optical fiber than you could ten years ago, but the problem is that optical fiber hasn’t reached here […] if I’m in an advanced country there’s a few very densely populated first world developed nation metropolis –is that have fiber-to-the-home but that’s a fairly rare phenomenon”
The author further stated:
“Maybe you have coax through your cable modem we’re looking at speeds of about a hundred megabit and it’s kind of being stagnant in terms of development then if you go down to DSL then you’re really looking at speeds of up to 25 megabits at best most rural areas you’d be lucky if you get 10 megabits and in many cases you can’t even get half that”
Andreas went on to say that the bandwidth not only has an impact on the people running node wallets and the other activities taking place on the Bitcoin network but “most importantly” on mining. He stated that the end result on “putting pressure” on bandwidth and latency is that it would further centralize mining, adding that it is already centralized because of its “reliance on chips.”
Furthermore, the Bitcoin proponent emphasized that the scaling should be the second layer and that privacy should be on the base layer.
“My personal opinion privacy is the change that needs to be done in the base layer and it needs to be done before the window closes. scaling can be done in the second layer quite effectively and we will also need some scaling on the base layer in order to support even more scaling on the second layer but our real focus right now should be privacy not increasing the block size further.”
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Tron [TRX] plunges by over 5% within an hour

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The cryptocurrency market has been going through a rough patch with the alternating bearing and bullish trend. Tron [TRX], the eighth largest coin on the CoinMarketCap list had been giving a tough fight to the bear and had succeeded as it managed to climb up the cryptocurrency list. However, January 31 saw the wrath of the bear that took down Tron by a staggering 8.2%, over the past day.
At the time of press, the coin was valued at $0.0255 with a market cap of $1.7 billion. The coin registered a 24-hour trade volume of $280 million with a fall of 8.22% over the past 24 hours. The coin was still falling by 5.30% while reporting and has noted a dip of 4.78% over the past week.
Tron [TRX] has had this phase where it suddenly falls by a massive margin and immediately starts recovering. On January 27, TRX’s market cap peaked when it hit $2 billion in terms of market cap, after which it fell tremendously and recorded a market cap of $1.788 billion on the very next day.
Source: Trading view
The coin noticed two more such falls, on January 28 when it fell in terms of market cap as it reached $1.734 billion after which it saw a sideways movement. However, again on January 31, the coin fell massively with over 5% in an hour.
The coin was highly traded on OEX recording a volume of $66.74 million with OEX TRX/ETH pair. The second exchange to record the second highest volume was Huobi Global, which registered a volume of $22.67 million with TRX/USDT.
TRX had had its moment of pumping around the niTron summit and close to BitTorrent [BTT] token launch. Tron foundation’s founder and Chief Executive Officer [CEO], Justin Sun had offered to airdrop BTT token for the willful investors who wanted to purchase the BTT token and were unable to do so due to a certain glitch in the system. Sun had tweeted:
“I would like to explore the possibility with @binance to giveaway free $BTT to everyone on launchpad fails to get #BTT today. #BitTorrent community wants you! Not 100% guarantee. Need to figure out detail. BUT RT if you agree! @cz_binance #TRON $BNB $TRX”.
Sun tweeted about the completion of this airdrop the very next day. However, that hasn’t protected its cryptocurrency, TRX from the loitering bear.
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Nasdaq to roll-out surveillance tech for 7 cryptocurrency exchanges

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The world’s second-largest stock exchange, Nasdaq, is set to roll out its proprietary surveillance technology for seven cryptocurrency exchanges to detect cases of fraud that are rampant in the virtual currency space.
Nasdaq has not revealed the complete list; the only cryptocurrency exchanges confirmed to receive the technology are Gemini Exchange and SBI Virtual Currency Exchange. An increasing number of cryptocurrency exchanges will look to adopt such a surveillance system to bring more transparency and increase adoption.
Prior to the confirmation of the client exchanges, a 20-person team from Nasdaq performs a stringent due-diligence process to assess the recipient, to identify whether the crypto-exchanges are both technically adept and morally right for this technology.
Tony Sio, an executive at the market surveillance division of Nasdaq, addressed the issue on January 30, he also spoke about the concerns that cryptocurrency-exchanges have faced for a long time and how the overall financial industry will react.
He said:
“Historically, we don’t do such a large vetting process for our clients because they are much more well-known. But as we started working with less well-known names, start-ups, then we realized we needed to do this check process.”
Sio further categorized the companies that are listed on these cryptocurrency exchanges into the following: Business Model, KYC/AML, and Exchange Governance and Controls.
Nasdaq is extremely selective regarding which exchange will receive the surveillance program, with Sion confirming that the stock exchange has a team of legal and technical experts that evaluated the risk.
“Business Model,” the first category listed by Sio, helps potential clients evaluate Nasdaq’s surveillance model by asking the right questions. The second structure adhered to internal administration to ensure KYC/AML rules are followed. The reputation of the exchange will be assessed by the ownership structure and the background of the founders. Lastly, the final section concerns itself with crypto-asset- listing standards.
The two revealed exchanges i.e. Gemini Exchange and SBI Holdings, have worked with Nasdaq before. SBI VC has been using Nasdaq’s matching system since June 2018 and the Winklevoss Twins’ Gemini Exchange has been using the stock exchange’s SMARTS market surveillance system since April 2018.
In addition to the above, Nasdaq is all set to launch their Bitcoin [BTC] Futures in the first half of 2019, with an official date of release not yet confirmed. However, Nasdaq faces still competition in the institutional investor’s space from NYSE, the largest stock exchange in the world, with the launch of Bakkt, a digital asset program backed by the Inter-Continental Exchange (ICE).
Tony Sio concluded:
“The objective that we’re trying to work with crypto, is we see this as a growing asset class. So we’re working to help provide our technology, it could be around matching, it could be around surveillance, to help our customers as they grow their marketplaces.”
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XRP will be used by several major banks around the world for cross border payments says SBI’s CEO

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Ripple’s major partnership in the east comes from Japan’s bank consortium SBI, which has several major banks under its wing. The CEO of SBI, Yoshitaka Kitao said in an interview with Boss’ monthly issue that major banks will use XRP around the world for Cross Border Payments.
A Twitter user and XRP enthusiast, @Dillon posted a tweet which translated the Boss’ monthly issue. He tweeted:
“SBI CEO @yoshitaka_kitao says he thinks 20 major banks will use XRP in 2019! And some other nuggets. Translated from the BOSS monthly issue Feb 2nd 2019. Lets go”
As per the interview for Boss, which is a 24-page monthly issue about the future of payments, Yoshitaka Kitao said that he was looking for new ways to integrate XRP into the payment system and that he wants to implement XRP massively before the 2025 Osaka Expo.
Mr. Kitao continued that it was difficult to make payments via Bitcoin and that he believes that XRP would be an alternative. He continued that he wanted to set the stage for XRP to take off when the time was right.
He continued:
“I think 2019 is the year when approximately 20 of the world’s major banks would start to incorporate XRP for international money transactions.”
Kitao added that Japan already has a money transfer application called “Money Tap” which used Distributed Ledger Technology [DLT] but not XRP and that he wants to inculcate XRP via “Corda” which is R3’s application for transferring assets.
With the recent R3 and SBI Holdings partnership, Mr. Kitao’s dream about setting XRP for a massive implementation in the financial system is closer to reality.
Yoshitaka Kitao stated:
“We would like to create a joint venture with R3 and SBI in Japan like we did with Ripple. And start up the consortium as soon as possible and develop the system while holding the conferences in which many people can learn the system in parallel. In this way, by using XRP, visitors from all around the world come to Japan can pay bills without exchanging the money from US dollars to Japanese Yen.”
Yoshitaka Kitao said that as soon as this partnership is done, they will be focussing on expanding this system across the world and that it was his dream to achieve this. Kitao said:
“Ripple has a strong feature on transferring money, therefore, we can take advantage by using Ripple for international money transfer and the rest of the transaction will be done using R3’s Corda… Our current strategy is to expand worldide and complete the system before Osaka EXPO 2025”
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Ripple/XRP: HSBC and CIT’s former executive vice president jumps ship and on-board Ripple

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Ripple is leading the revolution in the payment industry slowly putting the existing companies out of business. Joining this revolution is HSBC and CIT Bank’s former executive vice president, Stuart Aldertoy who has joined Ripple as General Counsel.
Aldertoy’s role would mainly include overseeing all legal services and manage the company’s global legal, policy and Bank Secrecy Act [BSA] compliance teams. Aldertoy stated:
“I am thrilled to join Ripple and work alongside this great team Brad has assembled as we find new ways to partner with leading policy makers and continue to create significant solutions for Ripple’s users and end-customers throughout the world.”
He added that blockchain technology is transforming the financial services industry and that Ripple was at the forefront for both its technology and thoughtful approach to policy.
Brad Garlinghouse said:
“As we continue to work with financial institutions and regulators across the globe to drive home the importance of fostering innovation while protecting consumers, I could not think of a better addition to Ripple’s leadership bench and our global legal team than Stuart.”
Garlinghouse further stated that Ripple was in need of Aldertoy’s experience and his expertise for the overall growth of the industry.
Moreover, Aldertoy has over 30 years of experience under his sleeves as he has worked both in the regulatory and banking sectors. He was working with CIT as executive vice president, general counsel, and corporate security. and was also responsible for all legal, corporate governance and insurance risk management matters. Prior to CIT, Alerdtoy was with HSBC North America as the executive vice president and general counsel.
This is not the first time that prominent people from traditional financial/economic sectors have jumped on the Ripple ship. Ripple had recently hired former Google executive as vice president of products.
A Twitter users @agasp68 commented:
“I hope 2019 will be a great year for the whole crypto market. I want to see every single one happy!!”
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Genesis Capital issued $1.1 billion in cryptocurrency loans during Crypto-Winter 2018

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Genesis Capital, the OTC cryptocurrency lending company lent out over $1.1 billion in cryptocurrency loans in 2018 as indicated by their Digital Asset Lending Snapshot for the fourth quarter of the year.
At the end of the third quarter, the total loan originations amounted to $500 million and saw an increase of more than 100 percent in just one quarter as the market meltdown ensued.
Despite the “Crypto-Winter” in which Bitcoin [BTC] fell from a January high of $17,000 to a December low of under $3,200 and the overall market cap was slashed by over 87 percent, lending and borrowing in cryptocurrency stayed firm.
The final two months of the year, when the crypto-winter saw its worst storm, hedge funds and trading firms used their “spot borrow”, which saw the loan figure rise to $153 million, an increase of $20 million from the previous quarter, according to Genesis.
Fiat currency lending was also introduced in the final quarter by Genesis. They mentioned that there was an increase in demand for lending in USD and other fiat currencies by their institutional clients.
The report stated:
“Long-term digital currency investors with appreciated assets can borrow cash against their crypto holdings without triggering a taxable event.”
In terms of cryptocurrency share in the loan pool, it bears no surprise that Bitcoin [BTC] comes in with about 75 percent of the entire portfolio share. Following up is Ethereum [ETH], which despite doubling its share from the previous quarter value of 3.7 percent to 8.1 percent, it still accounts for a small share.
The XRP share has declined by 50 percent since the previous quarter, despite the relatively better market performance compared to its peers. XRP stands at 8.6 percent, after a Q3 share of 17.8 percent, more than BCH, ETH, ETC, and LTC combined.
Bitcoin Cash [BCH], which hardforked in November 2018 has plummeted to 0.4 percent from a previous quarter high of 3.5 percent.
In light of the BCH decline, the report stated:
“Bitcoin Cash (BCH) borrowing has dwindled to nearly zero as we called most of our outstanding loans prior to the hard fork on November 15th. Managing forks is a precarious process when lending digital assets, and though we define specific hash rate, liquidity, and market cap parameters for delivering a forked coin, both borrowers and lenders generally prefer avoiding carrying balances through contentious hard forks.”
Michael Moro, the CEO of Genesis Capital, said that cryptocurrency lenders have fared better than the rest of the industry despite the plummeting prices. Given the success of this industry, several new players are entering the fray with Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital announcing plans to raise $250 million for loans to cryptocurrency companies.
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Bitcoin [BTC] can still democratize finance, says Abra CEO Bill Barhydt

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The cryptocurrency market has been affected by a series of sustained bear attacks that have resulted in the prices dipping beyond expectations. Even popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin [BTC], XRP and Ethereum [ETH] have not been spared by the bear, which supports falling on a consistent basis. Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency on the planet, which was expected to shoot up in value is now trading just under $3500.
In an interview with Breaker, Bill Barhydt, the Chief Executive Officer of Abra spoke about how Bitcoin can still change the financial game and how it can overcome the slump it is undergoing right now. Barhydt touched upon how crypto remittances is not the focus right now even though a couple of ideas were in the pipeline. He said:
“We just want to build out services that take advantage of this synthetic-asset platform in order to get, literally, millions of users in the system. Then, eventually we’ll be able to provide services to more bottom-of-the-pyramid markets, where things like remittances or low-cost microloans are really going to move the needle.”
The CEO then went on to talk about the ways in which Bitcoin has not been able to take the market share away from companies like Western Union and MoneyGram. He claimed that there are three basic pillars to provide banking in developing markets.
This statement came in the wake of discussing Bitcoin’s initial aim to ‘bank the unbanked’. In Barhydt’s words:
“Nobody in Haiti says, “My problem is that I’m unbanked.” Most people in Haiti don’t know what the eff that word means. You go to Mexico, you go to the Philippines, you go to Indonesia—nobody says, “Oh, my God, if only I wasn’t unbanked.” Nobody cares about that, except maybe people with great intentions at NGOs.”
In his opinion, people were only concerned if they could send and receive money at low costs and if these transactions will occur safely and quickly. He even brought up the topics of Venezuela and Argentina where the failing economy was the main reason for people to turn to cryptocurrencies such as Petro. He went on to say:
“…if you can collateralize real-world assets using crypto, [without] introducing new third-party custodians, you’re onto something really interesting. Because now you can represent fiat currencies, stocks, bonds, commodities in a way that doesn’t require you to become a bank. That’s interesting. You’ve got a combination of hard money and regulatory arbitrage to solve real consumer problems. That’s what I think it’s going to take to break into developing markets.”
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Tron [TRX] Technical Analysis: Coin hangs by the bull’s horn

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The cryptocurrency market saw a sudden spike on January 30, during which XRP and Bitcoin Cash [BCH] pumped. Tron [TRX], the eighth-largest coin, did not see a massive rise during this flash hike, however, was not performing worst either.
At the time of press, the coin was valued at $0.0273, with a market cap of $1.8 billion. The 24-hour trade volume of the coin was noted to be $250 million and registered a growth of 2.57% over the past week. The coin dipped by 0.98% over the past day but is slowly recovering as it registered a growth of 0.24% over the past hour.
1-hour
Source: Trading view
As per TRX’s one hour chart, an uptrend was noted from $0.0310 to $0.0273 after which it reported a downtrend from $0.0310 to $0.0277. The coin marked resistance at $0.0283 and support at $0.0263.
Bollinger Bands appear to be converged, decreasing the volatility in the market. The moving average line is under the candlesticks, marking a bullish trend.
Awesome Oscillator marks a weakened bullish momentum.
Chaikin Money Flow is under zero, pointing towards a bearish reign. However, at the time of press, a sudden spike is seen where the market is reaching the zero mark and might just cross it, changing it to a bullish trend.
1-day
Source: Trading view
TRX’s one-day chart marks a downtrend from $0.0338 to $0.0234. The coin noted an uptrend from $0.0132 to $0.0272 and resistance at $0.0294. The coin reported two supports, one at $0.0215 and another one at $0.0128.
Parabolic SAR notes the markers have aligned under the candlesticks, indicating a bullish market.
MACD line is under the signal line, pointing towards a bearish market.
Relative Strength Index indicates that the buying and the selling pressures are evening each other out.
Conclusion
Most of the indicators like, Parabolic SAR, Awesome Oscillator, and Bollinger Bands predict a bullish market. Whereas, Chaikin Money Flow and MACD are bearish for the coin.
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NEM Foundation’s pink slip handouts become intense as employees feel the wrath of the bear market

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The year 2018 has had a major effect on the cryptocurrency space, with price plunge of all the top coins in the market leaving the investors and project developers astray. This was evidenced by several projects reporting bankruptcy, layoffs and incomplete developments. Even blockchain-software company, ConsenSys and chip producing company, Bitmain, were one among them.
According to a recent report, NEM Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated for the development of the NEM blockchain, has hopped on to the bandwagon. The Foundation announced on their official forum that their new structural plan in promoting NEM failed as everyone’s goal at the Foundation was not aligned. It stated:
“When the new council arrived on January 1, 2019, we opened the books and saw the results of 2018. We saw a lot of talented people who were working hard, but not aligned with the same goals. We saw efforts being duplicated, and inconsistent metrics of success.”
The Foundation also stated that there was very little accountability for funds from the teams working within the Foundation and that there were “questionable” return of investments. This was followed by them claiming that this would have not been a problem if the price of the token, XEM, were high. However, since the bear has engulfed the whole market, the organization is finding it a “very big problem” to sustain.
“The XEM exchange rate has suffered catastrophic drops from this time a year ago, just as many other ambitious cryptocurrency projects have suffered, now the NEM Foundation is facing challenging budget decisions. We are in a tough spot like many others in this space.”
Nonetheless, the Foundation affirms that they have rebuilt their operating structure and mission, “hitting refresh and starting from scratch”. The Foundation will be doing so by dismissing all its members from regional teams and “replace them with newly created product-focused teams”.
“The reality of having one month left in funding means we won’t be able to support our current headcount, partnerships, and projects. We need to put everything on hold. This is painful since it hurts good people and partners, but the new council is aligned that we need to be transparent with what is happening behind the scenes of the NEM Foundation.”
This announcement by the Foundation had an affect on the price of NEM token in the market. According to CoinMarketCap, at press time, NEM was trading at $0.045 with a market cap of $407.06. The coin records a trading volume of $17.07 million and has plunged by more than 18% in the past seven days and over 4% in the past 24 hours.
Dustymcp, a Redditor said:
“They made Millions in the bull market that they got too greedy to sell for operation costs , cant say i feel for Them that is just baad management..”
godeatgodworld, another Redditor said:
“Wonderful news. One less shitcoin to worry about, for this surely marks the start of its walk to the gallows.”
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