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The latest market news is dominated by today’s investor reaction to the inflation readings out of the United States. The hot CPI data saw asset classes bleed, including stocks, bond ETFs and gold. Eric Balchunas, a senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg, has warned that with the broader market going down together, there’s nowhere for investors […]
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Just an hour ago, Bitcoin’s weekly candle closed after an eventual week in which the leading cryptocurrency surged from lows near $10,000 to a local high at $11,150. The coin now trades at $10,950 as of this article’s writing, slightly above the ~$10,850 weekly close.
The cryptocurrency, while above the pivotal $10,000 technical and psychological support level, is purportedly still in the middle of nowhere on a macro time frame. Bitcoin will need to move above local range highs or lows to confirm a trend.
One analyst remarked that Bitcoin closed the weekly candle in no man’s land despite the 10% rally from the local lows.
He did note, though, that BTC is not exactly bearish. The analyst cited the coin’s ability to move above $10,600. $10,600 is where three separate Bitcoin rallies topped over the past year, making it a level of importance for BTC to hold:
“Closed-back above resistance. I’ve been saying I’ll close my $12k short if that happens and I’ll do so today. We’re trading in the middle of nowhere ($11.5k resistance, $10.6k support) so I’m happy taking the win (amplified by the fact I already closed half at $10.3).”
Chart of BTC's price action since late 2017 with analysis by crypto trader DonAlt (@CryptoDonAlt on Twitter). Chart from TradingView.com
The stock market is likely to predict what comes next for Bitcoin.
Like BTC, S&P 500 and other leading indices have stalled at highs, resulting in the formation of a large consolidation range.
Analysts are hopeful that the S&P 500 and other stocks will soon continue their ascent due to continued commitment to inject the economy with stimulus by central banks. The Federal Reserve recently commented:
“The Committee decided to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and expects it will be appropriate to maintain this target range until labor market conditions have reached levels consistent with the Committee’s assessments of maximum employment and inflation has risen to 2 percent and is on track to moderately exceed 2 percent for some time. In addition, over coming months the Federal Reserve will increase its holdings of Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities at least at the current pace to sustain smooth market functioning and help foster accommodative financial conditions, thereby supporting the flow of credit to households and businesses.”
Further strength in the stock market is likely to act as a boon for Bitcoin, which has rallied over recent months when the S&P 500 has scaled higher.
Featured Image from Shutterstock Price tags: xbtusd, btcusd, btcusdt Charts from TradingView.com Bitcoin's Weekly Candle Just Closed—And We're In the "Middle of Nowhere"
Image Credit: Refer to Source
Author: Refer to Source Nick Chong
Will Martino, the former lead engineer for JPMorgan’s Quorum blockchain, shared insights into the project’s acquisition by ConsenSys with Cointelegraph. He believes that while the technology was good for its time, it inherited fundamental flaws from Ethereum (ETH). Martino was involved in the earliest iteration of the project, back when it was still called “Juno”. Since leaving JPMorgan, he has gone on to found Kadena, a proof-of-work blockchain that employs sharding to achieve scalability.
While details regarding ConsenSys’ recent acquisition of Quorum are sparse, it was noted that while divesting Quorum, JPMorgan was making an investment in ConsenSys. Martino believes that the investment that the bank made was higher than the price tag of Quorum. He suggests that this might have been an easy way for JPMorgan to get rid of a business unit that was not going anywhere:
“Quorum was a real attempt at making Ethereum technology stick in an industrial setting. But it’s being re-homed and I really don’t think there’s going to be a lot of progress down the line from ConsenSys. From my point of view, I think they’re mostly buying the brand and being able to just use the Quorum trademark and intellectual assets from that point of view for marketing.”
Martino says that the real issue with Quorum is that it just does not scale. This may come as a surprise considering that it is built as a private fork of Ethereum and as such, does not involve mining. However, according to Martino, the issue lies deeper, stemming from the Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM:
“So when you take something like the EVM, which was never the bottleneck on a public blockchain and you put it onto a private chain, all of a sudden, it can very easily become the bottleneck. And as one of the reasons that the Quorum had a lot of trouble just performing more than (the numbers I have heard) between two hundred and thousand transactions per second.”
Martino says his skepticism about Ethereum and its derivative technologies comes from both personal experience and talking to a lot of people in the enterprise space who have experimented with it:
“If JPMorgan, one of the biggest companies ever, can’t drive adoption, even when they have a great internal use case, you have to ask yourself ‘why’? And my answer to that is the technology is just fundamentally limited. And if you go and talk to other large system integrators, large consultancies, you’ll hear very, very similar things. So long as you don’t have someone who holds a lot of the Ethereum tokens as the head of Blockchain for the company, you’re going to find that people say: ‘We have tried using Ethereum, it just doesn’t work’.”
It is unclear whether JPMorgan has lost interest in blockchain technology altogether or just in this specific in-house experiment. Martino does not believe that the bank will switch to Hyperledger’s Fabric; a popular solution for enterprise companies. In his opinion, it is even worse than Quorum, which he referred to as being “best in class” at one point. Besides Kadena, Martino says that Near could also be a viable option. Yet he believes that the pandemic has slowed enterprise blockchain adoption. He noted that we may not see another major push until 2021-2022.
Image Credit: Refer to Source
Author: Refer to Source Cointelegraph By Michael Kapilkov
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