From a flashing Bitcoin indicator to the push for new upgrades to Litecoin and Cardano, here’s a look at some of the stories breaking in the world of crypto.
Bitcoin
A crypto analyst is sounding the alarm about a potentially bearish sign for the future price of Bitcoin.
Cole Garner tells his 11,000 followers on Twitter that BTC’s hash ribbons, which represent the simple moving average lines of BTC’s difficulty and hash rate, have just hit a bearish crossover.
According to Garner, the last time this happened was in mid-November of last year, just before BTC tumbled from $6,355 on Nov 13th to $3,220 on Dec 15th.
“Miner capitulation warning! Hash ribbons have confirmed a crossover.
Last time this happened was a year ago, just before BTC broke down from $6k.
I have to step out, will explain in more detail tomorrow, but TL;DR this is a BEARISH signal. Move slow…but manage risk.”
Fellow analyst PlanB agrees that in the short term, miners may determine they’re not making a profit and temporarily turn off their rigs.
However, he thinks that may change after November 21st, when Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment kicks in, making it easier to mine BTC.
“Yes there can theoretically be more capitulation, but in practice, we see hash rate is up and next difficulty estimated from this hash rate of last 650 blocks indicates a +4% difficulty adjustment, so no more capitulation.”
Ripple and XRP
Ripple is expanding on its efforts to boost the development and adoption of XRP.
Ethan Beard, who runs Ripple’s fundraising and development arm, Xpring, says the company has released a new SDK designed to make it easier for engineers to build on the XRP Ledger.
“We recently released a new SDK, the Xpring SDK. Previously, a developer would have to write 100 lines of Javascript, for example, in order to actually just do a simple transaction on the XRP Ledger.
Now, using this SDK, an iOS developer who writes in Swift can actually just use 10 lines of code to do the exact same thing. We’re going to make it available in a variety of different languages to support the entire world of developers.”
Litecoin
Litecoin creator Charlie Lee says he’s talked to a number of “major” crypto exchanges to assess whether they would delist LTC after the platform integrates confidential transactions.
According to Lee, the exchanges he has spoken to say LTC is not at risk, although he acknowledges anything is possible.
Cardano
Charles Hoskinson, the creator of public blockchain Cardano, says efforts to launch the platform’s proof-of-stake network just took a big step forward.
Unlike legacy financial systems built on centralized institutions and composed of SWIFT and ACH transactions, Cardano is building an open financial system that allows people to send the cryptocurrency Ada which is the platform’s digital cash.