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Bitcoin price continues to trade in the $9,000 range. Even though the cryptocurrency opened the day at $10,175 and reached as high as $10,500, it soon ran out of bulls’ support and fell back to $9,600 range with a market cap of $164 billion.
The entire cryptocurrency market is looking extremely weak at $431 billion. If it doesn’t cross $500 billion soon and stays there for a significant period of time, we may see a bear market that could last for months.
The bounce from the critical support level is encouraging. This shows that the market participants are keen to buy on dips. The first test for the bulls will be the $11,200 mark where the rally is likely to face resistance from the 50-day SMA and the support line of the ascending channel. If this level is crossed, the final litmus test will be $12,200 level. Above it, the BTC/USD pair will become positive.
Altcoins are suffering the same fate as Bitcoin. No major gains can be seen in the past 24 hours, except IOTA, which recently partnered up with Volkswagen, gained 15% value after the news. Nano was the biggest loser out of the top 50 coins. Its price came crashing down by almost 25%.
Other major cryptocurrencies including Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, continue to trade sideways.
A good thing to know: Ethereum Classic could pump soon because its fork’s called ‘callisto’ (CLO) snapshot is due next week. The clone will be an exact copy of the ETC chain up until block 5,500,000 and ETC holders will receive a 1:1 ratio of CLO coins.
Top Stories from the Crypto World
1. Coinbase finally launches Segwit
The transition is being implemented over the coming week, and should improve transaction speeds and lower fees. SegWit was introduced August of last year through BIP 141 (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal), however Coinbase was slow to adopt the technology.
The lack of implementation of the technology was increasingly frustrating for Coinbase users, who launched a petition calling for the exchange platform to prioritize SegWit implementation over other upgrades.
“We are delighted that through this implementation we can provide our customers with bitcoin withdrawal fees that are up to 20 percent lower, as well as faster-than-ever transaction speeds.” said Coinbase in a blog post.
2. Coinbase informs 13k affected customers of imminent data handover to IRS
US-based cryptocurrency exchange and wallet service Coinbase sent an official notice Friday, Feb. 23 to approximately 13,000 of its customers whose information it is legally required to turn over to the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
The IRS had initially asked Coinbase in July 2017 to hand over even more detailed information on every one of its then over 500,000 users in an attempt catch those cheating on their taxes.
However, another court order in Nov. 2017 reduced this number to around 14,000 “high-transacting” users, which the platform now reports as 13,000, in what Coinbase calls a “partial, but still significant, victory for Coinbase and its customers.”
3. Ethereum governance not that bad, says Vitalik
Coming amidst a heated debate over a proposal that seeks to standardize a method by which changes to the ethereum software would be considered as a way to retrieve lost funds, developers discussed how to clarify their process for accepting code changes and whether they should move to resolve perceived issues.
Ethereum’s governance model isn’t flawed, it’s just badly communicated, said Vitalik. Since the proposal was submitted in January, hundreds of community members have come forward against the proposal – the core of which stems back to the decisions made during The DAO hack in 2016. So much so that one of coding team’s veteran members even resigned from his post amidst concern about the process and the resulting backlash. Buterin said:
“I actually personally think that, in general, our governance mechanism as it is de-facto is really not that bad. Probably the main flaw is not so much what the mechanism is, as how we communicate it.”