Crypto Market Forecast: The week ahead, 1st April
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It was a week of steady gains for crypto markets and all the more notable as Bitcoin broke its $4000 resistance level, and Ethereum passed through its $140 threshold. Over the last 7 days BTC rose 3%, ETH was up ~4% and the overall crypto market rose a solid ~3%.
Tokens that give access to network staking rewards (Proof-of-stake style coins) continue to perform strongly in the short-to-medium term with Tezos (XTZ), Cardano (ADA), EOS and Decred (DCR) rising ~62%, ~17%, ~15% and ~8% respectively last week. Some analysts have earmarked 2019 as the year of crypto staking solutions. The sector continues to grow quickly with the staking User Experience (UX) improving as new visualization tools like dashboards and wallets make rewards easier to calculate and network participation more straightforward.
The main reason that crypto staking is gathering interest is the promise of passive incomes for large crypto investments. Investors are fiduciaries, and if they are investing in blockchains, they should be earning a share of network activity to preserve their pro-rata share of the network. POS networks reward investors by allocating network earnings proportional to the size of the stake.
On March 29th, Coinbase Custody announced that it would begin offering institutional clients staking services for the Tezos network via XTZ investment. Coinbase will hold client funds ‘cold’ as part of the solution and all funds required to be ‘hot’/online to confirm a stake to the Tezos network will be Coinbase Custody’s own funds. This solution lets Coinbase’s institutional investors earn on a Tezos blockchain investment, without having to worry about infrastructure and security hassles. The annual earnings on the Coinbase Custody Tezos solution is 6.6%, after Coinbase takes a service fee for managing network participation.
While Tezos (XTZ) was the week’s big beneficiary of positive sentiment surrounding staking with the release of the Coinbase Custody solution, prospects for the entire space remains strong as the Coinbase deal opens the door for other large custodians to begin offering their own staking products.
Upcoming crypto events
April 1st – Snapshot for Vostok token airdrop
Positive speculation surrounding the Vostok token airdrop was considered a key factor in the WAVES price run towards the end of 2018, and this Monday the snapshot for the airdrop of Vostok tokens to WAVES holders ends. The Vostok project has a successful private raise of $120 million for its blockchain which allows the deployment of Waves technology for government and private IT systems and the end of the snapshot may create some positive pressure for WAVES.
April 3rd – First Kucoin Initial exchange offering (IEOs), Multivac (MTV)
IEOs emerged as the crypto space’s most relevant fundraising option in Q1 2019, and Kucoin joins the fray with its first offering Multivac (MTV). A fully sharded blockchain, MTV has already garnered a USD 15 million war chest from round A investments from a group of prominent blockchain project investors including Arrington XRP. The sale is only accessible to Kucoin-shares (KCS) holders and this membership premium has boosted KCS prices 37% in the last month.
**April 8th **- First live property auction with Bitcoin and crypto in NSW, Australia
LJ Hooker, a major real estate company in Australia, is organizing a live real estate auction that will let users buy a luxury property on the Gold Coast fully in Bitcoin or Binance Coin (BNB). Viewers will be able to view the action in real time as a live auction is conducted at 8am local time with bids made in BNB or BTC converted into AUD and USD and displayed via a live data feed. Brave New Coin will be providing the live price of Bitcoin using our Bitcoin Liquid Index (expressed in both USD and AUD) for the auction, and convert every bid from potential buyers (in BTC) into AUD.
It was a strong week of trading for a number of assets in Brave New Coin’s Top 10 crypto market cap table. ADA continues an extended period of strong price performance, as highlighted by Cryptocurrency Newsfeed, a potential factor behind some of the weeks gains was the addition of two new ADA stablecoin pairs on the Binance exchange. EOS bulls were able to shake of news of a multimillion dollar hack of the token conducted on the Bithumb exchange over the weekend, indicating hacking risk may be priced into EOS.
The price of Bitcoin finally made a significant move in its push against the $4000 resistance level, experiencing a surge in buying volume around the 29th of March and finding a new temporary home around ~$4100. However, there is a feeling that the current price is tenuous, with some technical analysts calling for a short term price pullback based on historical signals.
Bitcoin hashrate continues to trend upwards indicating growing short term demand to mine the blockchain.
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