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Crypto Market Forecast: The week ahead, 25th February

Interested in staying up to speed with the events that will impact crypto prices in the week ahead? Then bookmark Crypto Market Forecast for a curated weekly summary of forward-focused crypto news that matters

A dramatic 7 days of trading ended with strong consolidations late in the week following many bumper green trading days. Despite the Sunday sell-offs the majority of the crypto markets ended the week up after sustained positive momentum. Crypto benchmark BTC ended the week up ~6%, ETH rose ~9%, and the overall market cap for crypto rose ~6%.

After an extended period of positive price movements for large-cap cryptos (the price of ETH rising ~55% between the 1st and 24th of February and LTC up 62% over the same period) a market pullback and profit taking was on the cards.

However, the shortness and sharpness of the drop, with the price of BTC falling more than $500 in five minutes, burned many traders and underlines the classically volatile nature of crypto and the challenge of pinpointing good entry and exit points.

With a CME Bitcoin futures contract (quarterly) market opening on the 25th of February and the Ethereum Constantinople hardfork expected on the 28th of February, there are fundamental signals that more volatile price action could occur in the next week.

In wider market infrastructure news, Binance launched the first version of its DEX solution for public testing last week to positive public feedback. While some argue that the Binance DEX is not a ‘real’ decentralized exchange (because transactions are settled amongst a close network of nodes), the fact that traders on the exchange can retain custody over their own private keys and fund wallets is a major step forward for security and user freedom.

Finally, Samsung has announced its Galaxy S10 smartphone would feature a built in cryptocurrency private key storage in a suite of ‘blockchain enabled’ solutions. There is hope that the feature will pave the way for greater digital asset adoption in the short run and it is expected that more crypto features will be announced prior to the S10 launch.

Upcoming crypto events

CME Quarterly futures market open – 25th February

This Wednesday the latest round of BTCK19 CME futures (contract started on December 3rd 2018) 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 begin trading on this day, and be settled on the last trade date in late May. CME bitcoin volumes have recently hit all time highs so there has been some market speculation on the magnitude of their effect on Bitcoin prices. If CME traders expect a price bounce on Monday following the Sunday sell-offs, this may exaggerate price movements as leveraged longs are bought. Vice versa if selloffs are expected to continue.

Ethereum network Constantinople hard fork– 28th February

The scheduled upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain is predicted on Thursday, February 28, at block 7,280,000. The hardfork will contain finalized Improvement proposals (EIPs) including EIP 1234: the Constantinople Difficulty Bomb Delay and Block Reward Adjustment which reduces ETH mining rewards and delays the move towards a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.

Tron Network hardfork– 28th February

The Tron network will upgrade to version 3.5 this Thursday with new features including multi-signature account capabilities, improved network data reporting and virtual machine reporting. The timing of the fork, so close to Constantinople, may turn some heads and it will be interesting to see how the market decides to trade around the fork. The price of TRX has fallen ~9.5% in the last month.

Market Cap top 10

New BNC marcap 2502

Despite market wide sell offs towards the end the week every crypto in the BNC market cap top 10 had a predominantly green trading week. EOS in particular had an excellent week. As the size of its network continues to grow (now over 4TB and much larger than the Bitcoin network), EOS bulls remain excited about the network’s prospects. Fee-less transactions have likely exaggerated this growth rate, but the project appears to have some mainstream defenders like Tim Sweeney, the creator of mega-game Fortnite.

BLX new 2502

Following a positive trend for most of the week, Bitcoin price hit strong resistance at the ~$4200 price level and corrections were swift and acute at this point with the price of BTC falling to around the $3800 level.

Hash rate and mining activity remains steady despite the erratic price movements, with the most recent 0.17% difficulty change occurring on February 24th.

BNC stats 2502


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