Crypto Market Update: Bitcoin Plunges $2000 Weekly, Fundamentals Pointing Upwards

We saw a week of sharp throughout the entire market. Bitcoin’s price plunged and it painted the entire market red. Of course, the altcoins also plummeted against the USD but remained relatively stable against Bitcoin. The whole market seems to be under a lot of stress, at least when looking at the fear index:

Crypto Fear & Greed Index on Feb 21, 2019

Wall Street, on the other hand, continues to rise as the bond market also saw serious drops. Contrary to the projections for the capital market collapse, key indices keep on climbing in the face of the declining Bitcoin. Google also doesn’t show a change in demand in searches such as “Buy Bitcoin,” “Buy Ethereum,” or “Ripple.” We can also see some volatility but there’s no significant change in the trend.

Block.one, the company behind EOS, was fined $ 24 million by the SEC. While that sounds like a significant fine, relative to the $ 4.1 billion raise it is not such a big deal. Will the weak punishment encourage more projects to take risks or will we see more cases as we saw in Kik where authorities identified it as a security.

Changes in exchanges and announcements of cryptocurrencies removal in Bittrex and Binance show that the market is being cleaned out, but on the other hand, new currencies continue to be listed on the market, so the multi-currency problem in the market still persists.

In summary, we had a week of declines with fear of reversing the trend of 2019. Most analysts predict a downward trend, which shows how market sentiment is changing at the moment. However, if we look at the technical analysis from the previous week, most experts actually predicted growth. Therefore, it can be concluded that the market does not follow predictions and behaves unexpectedly. Also, the market is waiting to see the regulatory developments around it as it will largely dictate some of the next moves.

Market Data

Market Cap: $222.8B

hour Volume: $57.5M

BTC Dominance: 67.6%

BTC: $8,388

ETH: $180

XRP: $0.25

BTC Shorts (BFX): 8.7K BTC

BTC Longs (BFX): 25.3K BTC

Market-Update-49-min

Bakkt Nightmare: Bitcoin Plunges by More Than $1,500 to $8,000. Shortly after Bakkt announced the launch of its trading platform, Bitcoin’s price fell by more than $1,000 in less than an hour. This was the lowest price of Bitcoin since June 11th. The altcoin market also suffered as almost all mid- and large-cap altcoins traded in the red.

Bitcoin Selloff Might Lead to Altcoin Season: Twitter Analyst. According to a popular analyst, a sharp selloff in Bitcoin could trigger the next altcoin season. He thinks so because Bitcoin holders might see the bearish trend as the beginning of the next altcoin season and relocate their holdings accordingly.

Dead Altcoins: Overwhelming Number of Crypto Projects Without a Single New Line of Code in 2019. According to a recent report which examined over 2,000 ICOs, over 640 of them haven’t added or written a single line of code throughout 2019. Despite all of this, their current combined market cap is more than $415 million.

Bitcoin-Powered RSK Acquires Social Network Taringa. The blockchain-based project of IOV Labs, RSK, has acquired social media Taringa which has upwards of 17 million registered users and more than 70 million monthly visitors. The goal of the partnership is to streamline the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based products amid the vast user base of Taringa.

John McAfee: Bitcoin Price to Reach $50K in the Mid-Term and $1 Million by End of 2020. Despite the violent selloff in Bitcoin, legendary entrepreneur John McAfee remains bullish as ever. He supports Peter Brandt in his prognosis that Bitcoin will drop to $5,500 before reaching a new ATH of $50,000 and also maintains his earlier prediction that Bitcoin will hit $1 million by the end of 2020.

Bitcoin Hash Rate Recovers Strongly, Returns to 90 EH/s. A few days ago Bitcoin’s hash rate dropped severely, only to correct a day later. Interestingly enough, a lot of the analysts correlated the drop in price to the drop in the hashrate as it happened almost simultaneously. In any case, Bitcoin’s hashrate is back to normal now and the network appears as secure as ever.

Bittrex Announces New Trading Platform Based in Liechtenstein. The popular cryptocurrency trading platform Bittrex has announced a new platform that is headquartered in Liechtenstein. Bittrex Global, as the new venue is dubbed, should be rolled out at the end of October and the reason for the location is the country’s regulatory clarity toward digital currencies and blockchain-based technology.