By 
Within a span of 48 hours, the price of Bitcoin dropped to as low as $8,300 from $10,600, mainly due to Mt. Gox trustee selling 166,344.35827254 BTC – an amount worth $1.7 billion. Although, at the time of writing, Bitcoin price is trading at $9,444, representing a market cap of $159 billion.
Even though this recovery might appear strong with major altcoins gaining as much as 15-20%, the bears are still in control of the market. It is important to note that Mt. Gox trustee hasn’t sold all the Bitcoins yet. There are still plenty left. Mt.Gox was the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world until hackers stole around 850,000 BTC from it in February 2014. According to the official document released by the Mt. Gox trustee, more than $1.7 billion worth of bitcoin is expected to be sold in the next few months.
Altcoins like Litecoin, DASH, NANO have gained 16%, 15%, and 26% respectively. Bitcoin itself has gained 7.3% in the past 24 hours. This has brought the total market capitalization to $387 billion.
On the other hand, analysts like WhalePanda have argued that Mt. Gox Trustee should have sold 40,000 Bitcoin on over-the-counter (OTC) platforms rather than on exchanges.
“MtGox was terrible and the incompetent way they are handling is terrible, saying that Bitcoin has been crashing since all-time high because of it is just silly. It’s only’ 40,000 BTC. It is about the same as claiming that Tether caused the run to $20k. People love their narratives though,” said WhalePanda.
If the Mt. Gox trustee continues to dump large amounts of bitcoin on cryptocurrency exchanges rather than in the OTC market wherein big buyers can trade with each other, the price of bitcoin will continue to be affected by the sale.
Ethereum co-founder and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson stated that bitcoin may have been overvalued at $19,000 if a short-term sell-off by a single entity could lead the price of the cryptocurrency to fall by a margin like this, emphasizing the liquidity problem in the cryptocurrency market.
It remains unclear whether the Mt. Gox trustee will dump over a billion dollars worth of bitcoin on exchanges as planned, or move to OTC market to prevent market manipulation.
Top Stories from the Crypto World
1. Cash might die but not hungry to develop digital currency, says China’s Central Bank Chief
The governor of China’s central bank has admitted that physical cash may become obsolete one day but insists the authority isn’t rushing to release a cryptocurrency.
He reportedly stated, “We must prevent major mistakes that would lead to irreparable losses, so we are cautious. We don’t like creating products for speculation and making people have the illusion that they can get rich overnight.”
Zhou, who is expected to retire this year, has presided over the central bank through an unprecedented wave of scrutiny against the domestic cryptocurrency sector. Led by the PBoC, a number of Chinese regulators and authorities phased out cryptocurrency exchanges out of the country before following it up with a blanket ban on initial coin offerings (ICOs) last year.
2. Hacked Coincheck will refund users, resume trading next week
Hacked Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck will return stolen funds to customers by the end of next week. Coincheck, which lost $534 mln in NEM tokens to hackers in January 2018, will also seek to reopen its exchange services by the same deadline.
At the same time, Japanese regulator the Financial Services Authority (FSA) acted on the results of its own investigations of Coincheck and other cryptocurrency exchanges, ordering several to cease trading altogether.
“In addition to strengthening in-house monitoring as countermeasures against unauthorized access from the outside as in this case, we will be carrying out security monitoring by external expert institutions concerning financial systems security and cyber security,” CEO Koichiro Wada stated.
3. The first blockchain-backed Presidential election just took place in Sierra Leone
On March 7, 2018 the world’s first blockchain-backed presidential vote took place in Sierra Leone. As election suspense heightened, a Swiss blockchain startup, Agora, was working hard behind the scenes to help process and tally the results using blockchain technology.
In this particular election, Agora utilized a custom permissioned blockchain technology that it has built over the last two years. Permissioned blockchain networks allow the network to appoint a group of participants in the network who are given the express authority to provide the validation of blocks of transactions or to participate in consensus.
Leo Gammar, the CEO of Agora, said, “I am grateful to Sierra Leone for showing the world how visionary they are in bringing free and transparent elections to their people.”