Facebook’s Libra faced a ‘combo-attack’ as multiple payment processors and companies decided to break up with it. The Libra project seems to be unraveling even before its launch. Calibra’s David Marcus gave it his best shot in the Congressional hearing but the concern over implications of this new global currency coupled with Facebook’s murky history with privacy seemed to have halted the Libra dreams.
Key Takeaways
- Binance’s P2P trading launched in China; BNB surged by more than 7%, became the top performer of the week.
- AliPay and WeChat responded that they do not service cryptocurrencies in response to CZ’s “YES”.
- CFTC announced its stance on Ethereum and stated that it is a commodity.
- Litecoin Foundation announced that it was trying to generate revenue to be self-sustaining.
The Tenacious 10 & their Performance
The cryptocurrency ecosystem got a break from the bears as this week has been relatively better than the last. Top 10 coins, including Bitcoin, showed a positive rise in their prices. Bitcoin, in particular, broke the $8,500 resistance and the 200-day moving average; however, it was ephemeral and slipped below it quickly thereafter.
Binance Coin witnessed the most growth over the last week considering the events that transpired, especially after Binance announced the start of P2P trading in China. This was a tailwind for BNB as it rose by more than 7%Â in the next 5 hours. However, it might cause more harm than good in the upcoming days for Binance, considering China’s stance on cryptocurrencies. Tron followed BNB’s performance and was up by 10.64%.
Crypto Indexes
Source: MVIS Index
The MVIS 10 Index is a basket of top 10 cryptocurrencies that tracks the performance based on the largest and most liquid assets. By the looks of it, the index is up by 80 points over the last week. YTD performance of this index is 35.59%, however, it is in the negative compared to the previous year, i.e., -9.87%.
Source: Bitwise Index
Crypto protagonist, Bitcoin is still the best performing asset as per the Bitwise Index. Over the course of a year, Bitcoin has been up by 34% and so are the Bitwise 10 [10.7%] and Bitwise 100 Indexes [6.1%]. Bitwise 20, 70 indexes are negative and have the worst performance.
The Ecosystem
Source: CoinMarketCap
With the above, it is safe to conclude that the cryptocurrency market is trying to get out of the slump that it’s been in. Generally, the ecosystem thrives relatively better when Bitcoin dominance is low. This gives altcoins some breathing room. At press time, the BTC dominance fell from 70% to 66% over a month, providing alts time to recuperate.
Ethereum received quite a lot of facetime this week due to the DevCon5 that was held recently. The conference provided an insight into the ETH community and the new updates but the price seemed unaffected.
A Look into The World Computer’s Future
Ethereum tried breaching resistance zones from $220 to $240 but failed. This resulted in a collapse of 25% and an even deeper wick. The price, stuck in a descending channel pattern, indicating a bullish break in the near future, which is just one side of the coin.
Source: TradingView
The other side of the same coin exhibited an extremely bearish possibility. The dreaded Death Cross occurs when 50-DMA moves below 200-DMA, usually seen during bear cycles and is widely used in the traditional markets as an indicator. For Ether, it means that the price will stay in this zone for a while. However, there are times where it could be a fake crossover causing the price to rise, invalidating the death cross.
RSI and price have both been registering a negative slope for over 5 months with a single exception on September 19 for RSI. This adds more value to the bearish scenario.
The weekly time frame also showed a bearish scenario as the price drowned well below the 21 weekly moving average, another bear cycle indicator.
Although the pattern for ETH is a bullish one, indicators tell a different story. This could perhaps be due to the position of the price, which is at the top of the channel, with no place to go but down. Ether is likely to slump to $125 in the upcoming weeks.
