Crypto Market Forecast: The week ahead, 24th December

Just in time for Christmas, the digital asset market has just enjoyed one of its best trading weeks of a difficult 2018. Market benchmarks Bitcoin, XRP and Ethereum rising ~22%, ~27% and ~49% respectively while the overall market cap for crypto markets rose ~28%, crossing past the $133 billion threshold.

It is difficult to judge at this stage whether this relative short term price strength will be sustained, particularly in low cap altcoin markets with daily trading under ~$150 million.

The general upward momentum in the crypto markets over the last week was punctuated by typical volatility and erratic buy/sell behaviour from retail participants, pointing to the possibility of negative price corrections in coming weeks.

The last week of green trading may be a small step to correct some of the damage taken during the bull market. But the climb out of the current dark pit of sentiment enveloping crypto markets, driven by external factors such as the missing adoption of digital assets, is likely to be slow and characterized by many more short leaps and slips.

Timely in this respect, sentiment surrounding the adoption of crypto payments recently got a huge boost, with news that social media giant Facebook is putting into motion plans to create a digital USD stablecoin for the Whatsapp messaging platform. The new coin will initially target the heavily used remittance payment market in India creating an ecosystem for the token using Whatsapp’s ~200 million users in the region.

Merry Christmas and happy trading. This Christmas I’m thankful for the many lessons I’ve learnt from blink-and-you’ll miss it crypto markets. 6 months really does feel like 6 years in this industry.

Upcoming events in crypto

28th December- CME BTC monthly contracts Expiration Date

This Friday the latest round of CME XBT futures ends. The nature of futures contracts means they need to be settled on a set, predefined date, based on a contract. All CME contracts will have to be traded, or settled, before this date. There is generally a fall in the trading volume of futures around expiration, that coincides with a rise in volatility and potential short/long squeezing. CME has emerged as a leader vs CBOE in BTC futures, with sizable and growing USD volume through Q3/Q4 2018.

29th December- NEM Catapult Software Release

Developed by partner, the Tech bureau, NEM’s upcoming Catapult software update promises to help the platform blockchain to deliver scalable, high throughput enterprise level blockchain solutions. Features include the ability to create private blockchains with features like muli-signature accounts. The update has been in development for almost 3 years and thought of as a key milestone for the blockchain. The price of NEM (XEM) has risen ~21% in the last 7 days.

29th December- TRON open source platform release

A favourite of many retail crypto traders, on Saturday the Tron project (TRX) releases a new open source platform to allow for greater community involvement in Dapp and smart-contract development. While Specific information on the project is scarce, TRON is well known for its enthusiastic community and the launch may coincide with speculative buying pressure generated by the eager Tron fanbase. The price of TRX has risen ~63% in the last 7 days.

Top 10 Crypto Summary

In a week harkening back to 2017’s bull market, the large cap alt market enjoyed a week of double digit green trading. As reported by Cryptocurrencynewsfeed the price of BHC was buffered this week by the news that the EDGE wallet would be activating it as a base pair on the Changenow exchange service.

To put these performances in perspective, despite gains of ~74% ETH is still down ~91%, having started the week down 94%. The road back to regaining value will still be a long one for digital asset markets.

The price BTC continued to show evidence this week that it may have temporary price bottom around the $3100-3200 price mark, yet again find buyer resistance and trading volume at these levels. The price of the token has hovered around the ~$4,000 level in the last few days and markets may be gearing up for another move soon.

After 3 continuous negative difficulty adjustments, the next Bitcoin Difficulty is expected to be positive. A positive sign that hashrate and mining activity has returned to the network following a difficult month.