Crypto Market Forecast: The week ahead, 28th January
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After sharp market wide sell-offs post Friday, the week ended with most major crypto assets marked heavily red. Crypto benchmark BTC ended the week down ~3%, while number 2 and 3 digital assets XRP and ETH ended the week down 9% and 11% respectively. A number of alt markets suffered heavy losses with technicals pointing to a market wide consolidation. The overall market cap for crypto slid nearly 6%, losing close to 7 billion USD worth of value.
Interestingly, markets held the $3500 price level stongly following news earlier in the week that the CBOE exchange had withdrawn the Van Eck-SolidX Bitcoin ETF application. While this is not the end of the line for a potential Bitcoin ETF in the United States, it almost certainly means the market will not have one by Q1 2019, likely delaying the possibility of a bear market sentiment reversal in the short term.
The muted market reaction to the announcement was likely because the withdrawal was somewhat expected. The ongoing federal government shutdown continues to create macroeconomic uncertainty, and appeared likely to ensure that the SEC would not gamble on any major decisions, such as approving a Bitcoin ETF, in the short run.
The security token landscape received a boost last week with news that the underlying hybrid security token of the Tzero exchange had began trading on a secondary market. The launch adds liquidity for buyers and sellers of Tzero token. It is hoped that the release, by democratizing and creating transparency for token movements, pushes greater short-term adoption and enthusiasm for security tokens.
A market stand-out last week was TRX. The token was able to buck market trends on the back of unique speculation and positive news events, rising ~3.5% in the bleeding red market. As highlighted by Cryptocurrencynewsfeed, buying pressure was built for TRX by the much hyped Bittorrenttoken ICO sale which is accessible with either BNB or TRX tokens.
Upcoming events in crypto
January 29th-30th- Decentralized Summit (Online)
The first Decentralized Summit is an online gathering of some of the world’s leading blockchain professionals and decentralization believers. The conference has a wide net of topics on its agenda, including streams for investors, designers and community builders. Speakers include, Michael Arrington of Arrington Capital, Connie Yang of Coinbase and Taylor Monahan founder of Mycrypto.
January 31st- Ziliqa Mainnet launch
Ziliqa (ZIL), a much hyped platform blockchain project out of Singapore, releases its mainnet this Thursday. Open launch, the new blockchain will feature Ziliqa’s unique Partial Byzantine fault tolerant algorithm, a sharding designed to add to scaling capabilities and a safe smart contracts solution. Upon launch the network will be in bootstrap mode, to ensure that network is capable of safely generating enough hash power to process public transactions.
February 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 Friday the snapshot for the airdrop of Vostok tokens to WAVES holders begins. The Vostok project has a highly successful private raise of $120 million for their blockchain which allows the deployment of Waves technology for government and private IT systems.
Market Cap Top 10
It was a challenging trading week for the majority of large cap crypto with sell-offs at the end of last week affecting most of the market. Stellar (XLM) dropped heavily post reports that the Stellar Development fund may be selling off XLM on exchanges, battering sentiment of the token. Markets were also rocked by forensic investigations implying that market data aggregators may be overstating XRP’s market cap by over $5 billion dollars. This would put XRP 2nd on Brave New Coin market cap table.
BTC had shown an ability to defend the $3500 price level for most of the week, even when faced with strongly bearish news like the ETF withdrawal, but resistance broke on Monday and led to sharp fall towards $3400 that defined the week’s trading.
Hash rate on the Bitcoin network has stabilized in the last few weeks, with the last difficulty adjustment being ~1% and the next expected to be ~0.16%.The stability of network operations is a positive sign that the price of BTC is aligning well with block rewards and hash power being used.
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