Crypto Brief Dec.30: Bitcoin price might drop below $7,000 plus Ethereum, Ripple, Tron, Coinbase, IOTA
From Bitcoin price might drop below $7.000 to Apple may remove Coinbase’s mobile DApp browser from App Store. These are some of the prominent news in the crypto space.
Bitcoin News
According to popular trader Josh Rager, King of Crypto could make another lower high after bulls failed to push the BTC price higher. A succession of higher lows means that Bitcoin is still in a downtrend, and a significant drop could be on the cards.
Needs to break above $7800s and close above for me to feel bullish about a possible trend reversal. Until then, price continues to range with possible accumulation (over five weeks in this range). So far, price possibly just made another lower-high today, he tweeted.
Analyst Kevin Svenson points to the fact that Bitcoin is still caught in a five-month falling channel. According to Kevin, the recent retest of the resistance didn’t mean anything for the bulls.
BTC getting above $7,800 / $8,000 is the biggest hurdle for the bulls right now, we are still well within the downtrend … a lot of people got really excited today based on a resistance test. Resistance wasn’t broken. No changes just yet, he tweeted.
Trader Satoshi Flipper tweet in the wake of this move that crossing $7,500 perfected an inverse head and shoulders neckline breakout, implying that the price has upside into $7,800 and potentially beyond. Some analysts say that the inverse head and shoulders bottomed depicted by analysts like the aforementioned could mark a macro bottom for the recent bear market.
Analyst Zoran Kole echoed this, remarking that Bitcoin is likely to burst past the $7,500 resistance due to the fact that liquidity has dried up in that range, setting the stage for a rally into a “new range.” While Kole didn’t tip his hand as to where he thinks this “new range” will lie, the consensus is that the leading cryptocurrency will enter the high-$7,000s.
At press time, King of Crypto is changing hands at $7,400. Notably, BTC’s dominance has slipped below the 68% level on the heels of Ethereum’s five percent price increase.
Ethereum News
A new Ethereum hard fork is upon us.
The Muir Glacier upgrade will delay implementation of Ethereum’s so-called difficulty bomb for more than a year. The move is designed to ensure miners are incentivized to stay on board as the platform switches to its new proof-of-stake consensus model.
The latest stats on Ethernodes indicate about 66% of node operators are currently prepared for the update, which is set to happen on January 2nd.
Ripple News
Ripple plans to expand partnerships with Brazilian banks in 2020
Ripple, which recently hit a valuation of $10 billion, is targeting more partnerships with Brazilian banks in the coming year. The firm’s current focus is to coordinate with banks and regulators in the country to make remittances more efficient, Luiz Antonio Sacco, managing director of South America at Ripple, according to Reuters Brazil.
Ripple launched operations in Brazil earlier this year and already has partnerships with Santander, Bradesco, Rendimento and other banks in the country. “With successive advances in Brazilian banking regulation to facilitate financial transactions, including international, opportunities here will grow greatly in the coming years,” said Sacco.
TD Ameritrade Might Add Support for XRP After Its Success with Bitcoin Future
When asked whether or not it planned to list the third biggest cryptocurrency, Online brokerage giant TD Ameritrade replied that they only offered support for CME’s Bitcoin futures but they would consider “additional opportunities.” The company didn’t provide any insight into what cryptocurrencies it plans to onboard next.
Thank you for your interest! Currently, we offer Bitcoin Futures on the CME. We will continue to monitor the market and consider additional opportunities going forward. ^ZB
— TD Ameritrade (@TDAmeritrade) December 29, 2019
XRP is now supported on its network of 3,000 machines.
The crypto ATM company General Bytes says ATM operators now have the option to decide whether they want their machine to support the digital asset.
@Aircoin_Hunting Owners can now enable XRP as it is backported to all machines sold to date. Of course, an ATM operator needs to enable it as they are the ones who own the machines, wallets, etc.
— GENERAL BYTES (@generalbytes) December 29, 2019
The news comes a month after Ripple’s fundraising and development arm Xpring invested $1.5 million in Coinme, a crypto ATM company based in Seattle.
Coinbase News
According to a Reddit post published on Dec. 28, Coinbase warned its users that in order to comply with Apple’s mobile App Store policy, it might be forced to remove the DApp browser feature from its wallet application. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong commented on the post:
Coinbase CEO here. This is really unfortunate to see. Apple seems to be eliminating usage of Dapps from the App Store.
If Apple customers want to be able to use Dapps, we may need to make this request know to Apple in some way. This is an important area of innovation in finance, and many developers and early adopters of this technology have millions of dollars worth of crypto tied up in these financial applications, which they will no longer be able to use on Apple mobile devices if this app store policy continues.
Sargos, a member of Reddid explains why is Apple and Google afraid of the Dapps and can against it.
Apple and Google have complete control over the mobile market which is the dominant way humanity interacts with the internet in today’s world, especially in developing countries. Having a policy which forbids arbitrary things like listing other apps for users to interact with is very dangerous as it effectively bans whole industries from competing on a level playing field.
This is a big problem for cryptocurrency especially as mobile web browsers cannot interact with blockchains and so users are forced to use custom apps that implement the web3 interfaces. This effectively bans wallets from providing a good experience to allow users to interact with dapps and since you can’t fall back to using a web browser on mobile it might end up being a total ban on the use of dapps on mobile platforms unless each dapp makes their own app (which just opens a whole new can of worms).
Popular analytics Omar Bham suggested that the moves are supposed to protect the firms’ businesses against potential decentralized competitors. He said in a tweet sent on Dec. 28:
Coinbase is removing decentralized application interaction from their mobile wallet, due to pressure from Apple. Web3 is in direct competition with Google & Apple. We should expect continued censorship on MetaMask, Coinbase, & other dapp browsers. Disruption ain’t easy.
IOTA News
The IOTA Foundation has said that an issue related to its mainnet has been fixed.
The network was reportedly unable to process transactions for 15+ hours yesterday. The foundation said a “corrupt” ledger state was caused by an edge case where the IOTA Reference Implementation (IRI) didn’t account for a transaction that was shared between two distinct bundles.
“Once it marked it as ‘counted’ in one bundle, it was ignored for the next bundle,” said IOTA, adding that the issue has now been resolved. The foundation also urged users, who are running an IRI node, to update it to version 1.8.3.
TRON News
Justin Sun, CEO of TRON has just made a comparison of TRON’s performance in 2018 with 2019, through which we can clearly see the strong development of the largest blockchain market in terms of this transaction volume.
▶️In the past year, the total number of TRON Dapps increased by 5 times, reached 659
▶️The number of active users increased by 13 times, reached 972,805
▶️The transaction volume increased by 4.5 times, reached 190,179,966,364 #TRX#TRON Onwards!??? pic.twitter.com/PN4V2IO2Z6— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) December 30, 2019
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