Market Overview: 5–11 March
It’s already for the second time during last month that mass sales start as soon as Bitcoin price tries to approach $12000. This time such sharp drop is explained by the extremely negative media background. The US SEC urged registration of cryptocurrency exchanges selling tokens qualified as securities. It’s obvious that not all cryptocurrency exchanges will be able to fulfill this requirement, but the ones with the biggest trading volume will cope with the problem. It is weird that this news caused a massive drop in such cryptocurrencies as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Ripple. They can’t be qualified as securities, and the delisting probability tends to zero.
Additional panic sales were caused by the controversial rumors related to the problems at Binance exchange. In the end, the exchange security proved to be all right and the problems concerned some users who didn’t pay enough attention to these issues. But the aftertaste remained…
It was for good reason that many experts claimed 2018 to be a hard year for cryptocurrencies in terms of operation security. An old story from a far 2014 related to the bankruptcy of the Mt. Gox also put pressure to the market. The market still feels the consequences of those events: $400 million worth of BTC and BCH was sold in the open market to reimburse exchange creditors. For the moment, there is no evidence if the trustee is going to sell the remaining 166000 of BTC.
The correction paused only on March,9 at $8500, the price felt some support and the market made an attempt to recover. But on March, 11 we got back to $8500, and if we keep this level, we expect the market to recover gradually next week. The volume of short open margin positions keeps growing, this means many traders bet on further decline. There is a risk of Bitcoin price drop up to $7500–8000.
Ethereum Classic and Monero decreased significantly by 34% and 32% respectively in just a week. The demand for Ethereum Classic dropped after the Callisto fork on March, 5, and Monero lost certain support due to shifting the MoneroV hard-fork from March 14 to April 30. Both cryptocurrencies can feel further pressure from sellers and demonstrate a worse dynamics than the market in general.
