Crypto Market forecast: 9th December
It was another quiet week in the crypto markets with the price of most large digital assets moving just a few percentage points. Market benchmark Bitcoin (BTC) rose by 2% to end the week trading above US$7,500. The number two and three crypto assets by market cap, Ethereum (ETH) and XRP, ended the week down 1% and up 1%, respectively. The overall crypto market cap rose by ~1%.
It was an important week for Ethereum, the largest public platform blockchain, as it successfully implemented the Istanbul Hard Fork early Sunday UTC time. 6 Ethereum EIPs were included in the hard fork, with primary upgrades focused around improving the network’s resilience against denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, interoperability with Equihash based proof-of-work currencies like Zcash, and reducing gas costs across network operations such as calling for on-chain data. Most users and ETH holders are unlikely to be affected by the upgrade. Depending on reactions to the feature upgrades by developers and miners, some buy/sell signals may emerge post-fork.
The fork implementation did not go entirely as planned, however. Popular Ethereum client Parity, which is used by 23% of network nodes and by many major exchanges and miners, released an urgent patch just before the upgrade was set to release. Without the patch, Parity nodes would not have been able to implement the hard fork. The patch is now available and Parity nodes can now upgrade to the forked Ethereum chain.
It was also a big week for the Peter Thiel backed crypto startup BlockFi. The crypto banking platform announced that it would now offer zero-fee transactions between BTC, ETH, and Gemini-USD (GUSD) trading. The founder and CEO of the project, Zac Prince, told Yahoo Finance in an interview that the offer is designed to let users “do things with their crypto that you can do with traditional assets and traditional systems.” It appears as though BlockFi is following the example of mainstream online financial brokers like Charles Schwab by offering zero fees for trading assets within their platforms. BlockFi also offers an impressive 8.6% rate on crypto deposits and offers specialist crypto lending services to institutional borrowers.
This week in crypto events
December 11th- Zcash Blossom Upgrade
Privacy coin project Zcash executed a major network upgrade later this week titled ‘Blossom.’ The upgrade is designed to reduce the network’s block time speed, which will halve and be set at 75 seconds. This should significantly speed up the blockchain’s throughput and keep transaction fees low. The US$ price of ZEC has fallen ~19% in the last month and has recently touched all-time lows. For remaining holders, the upgrade may be the fundamental boost the token needs to create some buying pressure before the end of the year.
December 11th- Network-wide Aragon DAO proposal vote
Members of Aragon, one of the Ethereum blockchain’s leading Decentralized Autonomous Organization projects, will have the opportunity to vote on a number of key network upgrade proposals later this week. The upgrades include the provision of a new token, the Aragon network Jury token (ANJ), to be used by DAO jurors during dispute resolution procedures on Aragon. The price of Aragon’s native public token, ANT, fell ~1% last week.
It was slim pickings for the bulls in Brave New Coin’s market cap table top 10, with only BTC,XRP, USDT and BNB marginally in the green. Outside of the top 10, Tezos (XTZ) continued its excellent price-performance in 2019, rising 25% in the last week moving contrary to the rest of the market. Last week mega-exchange Binance announced zero-fee staking for XTZ holders on the platform, calculated daily and paid monthly. This means another straightforward way for XTZ holders to access passive income from the network with fewer worries about onboarding tokens onto a new network.
The Bitcoin markets were dragged slowly upwards over the course of the week and the BTC/USD price is now sitting just around the key US$7500 psychological price level. Popular crypto analyst Cryptobirb has given some bulls hope with this chart that was built using Brave New Coin’s Bitcoin Liquid index price. The chart shows a potential fractal around this week’s weekly close that may suggest a bullish price reversal.
OhNoCrypto
via https://www.ohnocrypto.com
Aditya Das, Khareem Sudlow