Trading is muted in crypto markets, especially with respect to Bitcoin. After measurable gain early on Monday, BTC mostly stayed around its new $10,500-10,700 level. The rest of the market is seeing considerable pullbacks, with almost all major coins posting losses.
Cryptocurrency price dynamics on August 20. Source: Coin360
The most notable Bitcoin news on Monday was the apparent change of heart by the owner of the @Bitcoin account on Twitter, with 900,000 followers. The handle was previously known for favoring Bitcoin Cash.
Most of the recent tweets appear to have been deleted, with recent activity consisting of retweets discussing the change, as well as changing the page’s bio link to Bitcoin.org, instead of Roger Ver’s Bitcoin.com
I have no proof of this, but I think the owner of @bitcoin must have had a romantic relationship with Roger Ver and recently broke up with Roger. That’s the only thing that can explain why @bitcoin stopped supporting BCH.
— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) August 20, 2019
The altcoin landscape is more exciting: Ethereum began a powerful rally on Sunday, increasing by almost 10% over two days to reach a maximum of $202. A small correction from those levels was expected, with ETH falling a few points today.
ETH / USD H4 Chart by TradingView
There has been no major news that would provide an immediate explanation, so the move is most likely of a technical nature. Vitalik Buterin did however give an interview to the Toronto Star, which was published yesterday. Due to the general nature of the publication, the interview was hardly ground-breaking: Vitalik discussed regulation, Ethereum use cases, while also emphasizing that Ethereum in its current state is not scalable. In other words, the interview was slightly bearish and clearly did not contribute to market movements.
ETH Technical Analysis of yesterday’s leg is available on Crypto Briefing.
XRP Rises On Ripple News
XRP made headlines yesterday for a news story with which it was almost totally unrelated: Santander, one of Spain’s leading banks, has pledged to implement the XRP-less xCurrent product created by Ripple Labs.
XRP / USD H4 Chart by TradingView
The market reaction was in the end quite tame: XRP briefly hit $0.29 soon after the news was published, a change that was within natural trading range. It has since fallen by about 7%, touching $0.27.
Ethereum Classic Scores A Rise
The only winner of Tuesday among the top-40 appears to be Ethereum Classic, which saw a rally tonight that pulled it from $5.51 to a maximum of $6.19, a 12% increase.
ETC / USD H4 Chart by TradingView
The only notable news that can be found about ETC is its participation in ETHBerlin on Thursday, the timing of which is unlikely to be related to the actual price increase. It seems likely that the movement was of a technical or insider nature, as there have been no fundamental catalysts to justify such a strong increase.
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