Crypto Market Forecast: The week ahead, 4th March

After significant volatility from the 18th to the 25th of February, crypto markets held steady last week despite a few major news events that would typically have had the power to influence traders under different market conditions. The price of BTC fell ~0.1%, while the overall crypto market rose ~0.5%, with a few select altcoins enjoying strong gains.

The major Ethereum network upgrades, Constantinople and St.Petersburg successfully went live last week sticking to a pre-set release schedule. The upgrades add the ‘difficulty bomb’ to the blockchain and restricts block rewards from 3 ETH to 2 ETH (the thirdening), putting financial pressure on current miners. The upgrades also eliminate Ethereum Improvement protocol-1283EIP which was thought to contain a major security vulnerability.

On February 26th, Nasdaq began listing Brave New Coin’s Bitcoin and Ethereum Liquid price indices. BNC’s ‘Liquid Index’ (LX) indices calculate a fair global value for the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum, expressed in USD, every 30 seconds. The methodology brings more transparency to the pricing of crypto assets — the lack of which has concerned regulators when evaluating investment products for approval.

There has also been a major campaign on crypto’s most popular social media platforms pushing users to delete their Coinbase accounts – #deletecoinbase – triggered by Coinbase’s recent acquisition of Neutrino, a controversial blockchain analytics firm. The firm is run by the former operators of the Hacking Team, which has a history of selling spyware to governments which was then used for the surveillance and incrimination of journalists and political critics.

Stories like this will likely diminish future ‘Coinbase effects‘ (positive, speculative price boosts tokens have received when pre-listing on Coinbase) in addition to the platform’s appeal as an asset custodian and institutional crypto service provider.

Upcoming crypto events

5th to 9th March- Ethereum CC (Community Conference) 2nd edition in Paris, France

The conference targeted at bringing together the international Ethereum developer and builder community is backed by major ecosystem ventures like Makerdao and mainstream companies like Opera and HTC. The event will have 250+ attendees and speakers include leading Ethereum developer Vlad Zamfir and Mycrypto founder Taylor Monahan. With Constantinople recently released, useful announcements and perspectives on Ethereum 2.0 are likely to emerge from the event.

7th March- Bitpanda begins trading Lisk (LSK)

Lisk (LSK), one of crypto’s original platform blockchain projects, will have its token launched for trading on one of Europe’s leading retail crypto exchanges, Bitpanda. Lisk won a community vote for the right to list on Bitpanda, indicating strong support for the token from retail traders in Europe. Leading crypto trader Josh Olszewicz, has recently suggested that LSK may be hitting the bottom of a bear trend.

9th March- Monero (XMR) hard fork

The privacy-solution focused Monero network will launch a major hardfork on block 1788000 (~ expected to be this Saturday). The fork will include a tweak to the blockchain’s current Proof-of-work Consensus model, bug fixes and other performance improvements. The price of the XMR token has risen ~12% in the last month, while the network’s community remain in serious discussion about whether it should remain ASIC-resistant, a feature that limits hash power.

Market cap top 10

It was mixed trading for large cap assets with a variety 7-day price patterns amongst the top assets in Brave New Coin’s market cap table. Binance Coin (BNB) continues to position itself as 2019’s altcoin stand-out and market hedge, rising to 9th in the market cap table. As highlighted by Cryptocurrency Newsfeed, recent announcements like the addition of the 0x/BNB trading pair, add to the utility of the token and open it up to be accessed by new altcoin communities.

For most of last week the price of BTC ranged between the $3750 – $3850 levels, finding buyer/seller resistance at the respective thresholds before ending the week hovering around the $3800 level. Interestingly, mainstream news announcements like that the Samsung Galaxy S10 would come with in-built functions to support Bitcoin failed to create any price momentum.

Hashrate on the bitcoin network remains steady and on a slight uptrend. The network’s next difficulty upgrade in ~6 days is expected to be +~2%.