3 snippets to begin your day: XRP in Japan, Roger Ver takes on YT and more

Whales on the hunt

Bitcoin’s price performance since the halving last month hasn’t exactly lit the world on fire. While many expected BTC to surge soon after and touch the highs set last year, that hasn’t happened. Instead, Bitcoin has flirted with the psychological resistance of $10,000, with the king coin well below the mark, at the time of writing.

All’s not lost, however, as the number of whale traders has continued to rise over the past few months, with the same now touching levels last seen in September 2017. The same was revealed by Glassnode in its latest report,

“The price of BTC is now more than 20x higher than it was when we first saw this many whales, implying that more wealth is being held by whales. However, the average balance held by each whale has decreased during this period, such that whales actually hold less BTC now than in 2016, and less wealth (in USD terms) than in 2017.”

YouTube on Roger Ver’s list

As if getting people interested in Bitcoin Cash wasn’t enough work, popular proponent Roger Ver now has to contend with YouTube shutting down his channel for “basically no reason.” While YouTube, before reinstation, had claimed that Roger Ver and Bitcoin.com’s channel had violated the video streaming platform’s Terms of Service, Ver was quick to go all guns blazing.

Calling out the platform for its history of shutting down crypto-influencers, Ver claimed that the channel is looking into alternate platforms such as memo.cash and lbry.tv, platforms that are actually censorship-resistant.

Like always, Ver was also quick to accuse Bitcoin maximalists of being behind the complaint that led to the Bitcoin.com channel getting banned. “…. A bunch of these Bitcoin Core anti-competition maximalists falsely reported the video saying ‘It’s a Bit[coin] Cash scam!’ or some nonsense like that,” he said.

Good news for XRP… Finally

2020 has not been a great year for XRP, with the popular crypto recently falling behind Tether on CoinMarketCap’s charts. In fact, it is probably the worst performing large-cap cryptocurrency in the market, with XRP noting YTD gains of -0.05%, at the time of writing.

However, some good news may be in order as according to a survey done by Japan’s BitMAX, XRP continues to retain its popularity among the East Asian populace, with over 25% of those surveyed claiming that it is their favorite coin. Only Bitcoin polled a higher percentage, with Ethereum way back at 9%.

This is an interesting finding since this comes on the back of Japan’s Virtual Currency Exchange Association revealing that XRP is just behind Bitcoin with respect to Yen-denominated holdings. Perhaps, such popularity is understandable. After all, Japan’s SBI Holdings also made a lot of news after it offered XRP as shareholder benefits a few months ago.

Now, if only a Twitter poll was enough to brag about a crypto endlessly.