Decentrl’s Crypto Market Watch & News Essentials

Decentrl.Agency
Sep 6, 2018 · 5 min read

published 27th August 2018

Decentrl’s Market Watch: We’ve seen little directional movement in the markets for the past two weeks. Shortly after the release of our last market watch update, bearish actors drove the price low into our previous support block by opening large margin-short positions below $6,000 on August 14th. They were not able to sustain the downwards momentum when a mystery spot buyer stepped in to bring us back into the trading range of $6100–6600.

Again, in the event bears hold the range high and we see a continuation of the downward trend, we look to supports $5800, roughly $5400–5500, and next from $4800–5000. Price action look favourable for Bitcoin bulls, but we have no confirmation or high volume break out yet.

For the next 10 days, after the low of ~$5850, price ping ponged with daily closes all within the tight $500 range. The most noteworthy price action occurred on August 22nd, when a short-squeeze attempt was made during an hour-long period when Bitmex, an unregulated derivatives exchange, went down for maintenance. Essentially, we saw an intraday pump and dump, as the price surged to a high of $6899 on Bitfinex, and shortly after returned to a low of $6250. The pump instigators took advantage of the Bitmex downtime while 40% of all notional Bitcoin trading was offline, but they were not able to push the price far enough to result in cascading short liquidations. In fact, very few shorts were closed during this time.

During this entire two-week period, margin shorts have surged further while spot buyers have been eager to have their hidden orders filled on Bitfinex. Currently the ratio holds at $3 held in margin short for every $2 held in margin long.

If bulls can push and hold above $6850, many underwater shorts will be pressured. If price action breaks $7200, it is likely we see cascading liquidations and a surge much higher, potentially facilitating a movement upwards of $1,000 in a day.

At the time of this writing, Friday, August 24th, price is holding above $6600, a very bullish sign.


A fight in the Bitcoin Cash community is fomenting somewhat behind the scenes. Craig Wright, controversial cryptographer who has claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, is soon launching a fork of Bitcoin Cash dubbed “Bitcoin SV,” short for “Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision,” with the support of Calvin Ayre, owner of Coingeek.com and Bitcoin Cash mining investor. Proponent of Bitcoin Cash Jihan Wu, CEO of the largest crypto mining company Bitmain (which now holds 5% of the circulating supply of Bitcoin Cash), commented on the poor quality code of Bitcoin SV and said Wright “must be a fake Satoshi,” in a group chat that later leaked to Twitter.


A 19-year-old in Santa Clara, California has been arrested and charged for hijacking mobile phone numbers to steal bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, totaling over $1 million in suspected theft. The allegedly stolen funds have been spent on things such as a $200,000 McLaren sports car. The suspect was caught using records Google provided that showed a device used to commit “SIM swaps” had also been used to access the suspect’s email.


Decentralized apps, or “dApps,” exploded in popularity during the crypto market’s enormous bull run in 2017, but now the most popular have suffered an extreme decline in use. CryptoKitties, the most popular dApp that at one point produced a cat on the Ethereum blockchain that sold for over $100,000, has now declined in use by 96%. The dApp and betting platform Augur has also lost traffic significantly. Co-founder Joey Krug blamed the mass exodus on high fees and the platform’s complexity. He said he knew it would, “be expensive, slow, and difficult to use…” but “it does work at a fundamental level now.


Real estate at the St. Regis Aspen Resort, a luxury vacation spot in Colorado, is now beingsold using blockchain-based security tokens through the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. This is Indiegogo’s first security token offering and it’s only accessible to accredited investors. “We think we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a benchmark for what real estate tokenization looks like,” said Stephane De Baets, owner of The St. Regis Aspen Resort.


Two notable individuals from the fiat world, Paul V. Mockapetris, co-inventor of the domain name system (DNS), and Kaine B. Kim, now former Deputy Director of South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC), have left and now are moving into the cryptocurrency industry. Mockapetris has gotten involved with Coinweb, a platform that makes using blockchains and cryptocurrency more user-friendly while Kim has joined seriesOne, an ICO crowdfunding platform.


A researcher at the San Diego Supercomputing Center was awarded a government grant of $818,433 from the Nations Science Foundation to develop the “Open Science Chain.” OSC is to be a distributed ledger facilitating the sharing and verifying of data from researchers and their experiments. The grant begins September 1st, 2018.


In 75 tweets, Ethereum blockchain founder Vitalik Buterin explained the roadmap for implementing a new consensus mechanism intending to greatly increase the speed at which new entries can be added to the distributed ledger. Buterin refrained from giving a date for the change and ended on “formal proofs, refinements to the specification, and ongoing progress on implementation” (which at least 3 developers are already working on) are left before deployment is in sight.


Napier University and the blockchain-based KYC platform Blockpass are working togetherin a £600k collaboration to create the “Blockpass Identity Lab,” with the intention to “explore ways in which blockchain technology can protect personal data from online scammers and hackers.” This places Blockpass at the intersection of several big trends (blockchain, digital identity, and the Cloud).


Decentrl has partnered with World Crypto Con at the Aria Hotel Resort on Oct 31-Nov 2 in Las Vegas. This is a set to be the destination conference for over 5000 crypto-traders, influencers and early adapters from the cryptosphere. Decentrl is WCC’s lead agency, advising on panel topics, selecting and vetting speakers, and developing strategic marketing opportunities. If you are interested in getting involved, please get in touch with us at info@decentrl.agency.

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Boutique consultancy for blockchain startups: Marketing, Biz Dev, Strategy, Partnerships, Crypto-Economics, Community Building & Investor Relations.

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