From a trio of forecasts on the future price of Bitcoin to the countdown to Ethereum’s big Istanbul upgrade, here’s a look at some of the stories breaking in the world of crypto.
Bitcoin
Crypto analysts are trying to decipher what’s next for Bitcoin.
Analyst Mati Greenspan says he thinks BTC’s pullback from $14,000 may soon come to an end.
In a recent newsletter, Quantum Mechanics founder Mati Greenspan compares Bitcoin’s previous drawdowns to the leading cryptocurrency’s retracement from its yearly high set in June.
“It’s now been exactly five months since bitcoin topped out just below $14,000 per coin. Since then volumes have steadily decreased despite the introduction of Bakkt future contracts and Fidelity digital entering the space.
Looking at Bitcoin’s short history, we can see that the average drawdown is approximately 43% and tends to last 122 days… Of course, past performance is not an indication of future results but just by the data, it would seem that the worst of this retracement might just be behind us.”
Veteran trader Tone Vays says he thinks Bitcoin is in the danger zone and could quickly lose support if it once again falls below $7,000. However, if BTC can climb above $8,000 in the short term, Vays says he may change his tune.
“I will not call this the bottom of the bear market…
I’m not ready to be a bull yet. But if the price of Bitcoin goes above $8,000, it’s possible I could become a bull. But I don’t believe that’s going to happen this year.”
Meanwhile, analyst Joseph Young says the current downturn may prove to be a big test for crypto traders across the board.
“The sell pressure on bitcoins seems to be too intense.
Now, most major cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, XRP, etc. are in the negative year-to-date. This will test the heart of investors and entrepreneurs in the space, especially coming down from a big spike to $10,600…
If BTC falls to the lowest of the supports in $4,200, I’ll be ready to stack sats.”
Ripple and XRP
Ripple has announced the winner of its recent Xpring Hackathon in San Francisco.
Two undergrads from UC Berkeley, Ayush Aggarwal and Eric Hou, built a money transfer app using the Interledger Protocol, which is designed to move capital across virtually any type of fiat or cryptocurrency.
According to Aggarwal, the app uses QR codes to send money instantly.
“Because we used Interledger, we were able to use any asset basically known to man. So any kind of ledger that’s in a bank – once the settlement engine is written for that ledger, we can use it.
Going forward, the next step would be to integrate XRP, which already exists. And once more settlement engines are created, we can start integrating those into the application.”
Ethereum
Ethereum’s anticipated upgrade, Istanbul, is now set to launch on Saturday, December 7th. You can follow a real-time countdown clock here.
With the launch date approaches, the Ethereum development studio ConsenSys has published an overview of the changes in store for the leading smart contract platform, including scalability upgrades and efforts to boost interoperability.
“Istanbul brings upgrades that will alter the cost of various opcodes to prevent spamming blocks and improve overall denial-of-service attack resilience. This upgrade will enable greater Ethereum and Zcash interoperability as well as with other Equihash-based proof of work cryptocurrencies.
There will be various changes to opcodes (operation codes), which will also increase scalability performance for solutions based on zero-knowledge privacy technology like SNARKs and STARKs.”
You can check out the full overview here.