Bitcoin and Ether Market Update: January 09, 2019

Bitcoin and Ether are hovering around $4,000 and $150 respectively as they are looking for short to mid-term support levels.

BTC-USD

Bitcoin lost $60 of its value on January 7, 2018, and dropped from $4,170 to $4,110 on the Bitfinex daily chart. Bulls were trying everything possible to hold $4,000 and use it as a launchpad for further movements upwards.

CoinfloorEX, a subsidiary of the UK cryptocurrency exchange Coinfloor, will offer the trading of physical Bitcoin futures on the Asian market under a new name. The platform will now be called Coin Futures and Lending Exchange, or CoinFLEX for short, and will offer futures contracts for bitcoin, bitcoin cash, and ether that can be leveraged up to 20 times. The announcement was made by the company co-founder Mark Lamb in an interview for Bloomberg as the company plans to introduce their new product to Asian retail investors beginning next month.

The new business is owned by a consortium including famed early crypto advocate Roger Ver, Trading Technologies International Inc, and will be based in Hong-Kong.

More news from Asia reports that the Financial Services Agency (FSA) is reportedly considering bitcoin and ether-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs). According to an individual familiar with the agency’s plans, the financial watchdog concluded that digital currency futures “products would achieve little besides stoke speculation,” but ETFs are nonetheless being seriously analyzed. This is the exact opposite stance to the one taken by the United States, where the SEC and CFTC are risk-averse on ETFs but permit physical bitcoin futures trading, Bloomberg reported.

In a recent tweet, the NASDAQ-powered platform DX Exchange announced its tokenized stocks launch of Amazon, Baidu, Apple, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, and Tesla available to trade. Various crypto to crypto and crypto to fiat pairs also announced including XRP, Litecoin (LTC) and Cardano (ADA) pairs.

The BTC-USD pair closed January 8, 2018, with another red candle on the daily chart, this time with an insignificant loss of approximately $10. The negligible losses could be a sign that bear pressure is minimal at this point and bulls will be looking for another breakout to levels above $4,200.

ETH-USD

The upcoming Constantinople Fork is without a doubt the engine behind recent gains as the ETH-USD pair continues the recovery process.

Ethereum dropped 3.7 percent on January 7, 2018, and closed the trading day at $154 after reaching $165 during day trading on January 6.

Ethereum Classic (ETC), the original pre-fork version of Ethereum, experienced network disruptions, which commentators described as a 51% attack. This vulnerability allows users to double spend funds as long as they control more than 50% of the network’s mining hashrate.

On January 5, 2018, the U.S. exchange Coinbase reportedly “detected a deep chain reorganization of the Ethereum Classic blockchain” which included about 12 reorganizations with double spends totaling 219,500 ETC (~$1.1M). The company paused interactions with the ETC blockchain alongside other exchanges including Coincheck and bitFlyer.

In a related tweet, ETC developers denied the 51% attack rumors attributing the increased hashrate to the testing of new 1,400/Mh ethash machines by application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) manufacturer Linzhi.

The Ethereum foundation announced in a blog post from January 7, 2018, that it would grant $5 million to Parity Technologies to support scalability, usability, and security work. The provided funds will be used on “Parity’s work on the Casper project, sharding, light clients, developer tools, QA, audits and infrastructure improvements.”

ETH dropped as low as $145 during the trading session on January 8, 2018, to close the day at $152.7, a little more than a one percent loss. The second biggest cryptocurrency is now looking to hold $150 to set the ground for $175 to $183 prior to the planned fork.