Crypto Market Forecast: W/C 26th October 2020

It has been an excellent week of trading for bulls in crypto markets with the Bitcoin price up ~13% over the last week – tearing past the USD13,000 price level to reach its highest level since January 2018. At the same time the Ethereum price was up 12% and the Ripple Price was up ~6%. The overall crypto market cap jumped by 10% for the week.

The apparent trigger for the Bitcoin price run was an official announcement made by online payments giant Paypal confirming that it would soon be allowing its 346 million active users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. Initially, PayPal will support Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin (LTC), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). The cryptocurrency service will be first rolled out to US-based customers before an expansion to select international markets. It has also been revealed that users will be able to spend their crypto on goods and services from vendors that support Paypal. Merchants, however, will not be able to support cryptocurrency payments until at least the first half of 2021.

PayPal CEO Dan Shulman said that a shift to digital currencies is inevitable as digital currencies offer clear advantages of financial inclusion and access; efficiency, speed, and resilience of the payments system; and the ability for governments to disburse funds to citizens quickly. The move has been seen as a huge step in the mainstream adoption of digital currency.

Bitcoin’s outlook as a store of value was also given a boost as billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones bullishly described Bitcoin as the “best inflation hedge” on Thursday. Jones who in May revealed that the Tudor Group investment corporation holds a Bitcoin futures contract position said, “I like bitcoin even more now than I did then. I think we are in the first inning of bitcoin and it’s got a long way to go.” The Wall Street legend says Bitcoin is set to succeed in an environment of unprecedented fiscal expansion and quantitative easing by the US Fed that will bring a wave of inflation to the US economy. Bitcoin has economic characteristics of finite supply and a fixed encoded inflation rate that establish it as a strong defensive trade against assets like fiat currency. Bitcoin has faced questions in the past around credibility and integrity, but a growing list of figures and companies in mainstream finance are now backing it as a viable investment and technology opportunity.

In other news, the OKEx exchange has still not renewed withdrawals since stopping them on October the 16th. The exchange has supplied very little information, but it appears its founder Xu Mingxing has been arrested by Chinese authorities and he holds the private keys to exchange wallets.

Crypto news for the week ahead

26th October – OMG lists for trading on Bitstamp
OMG network (OMG) formerly known as Omisego, is a layer-2 payments system built on Ethereum that is designed to support scalable, efficient cryptocurrency payments without sacrificing security. This week its native token launches on major European exchange Bitstamp with zero-fee trading until the end of the year. The token will launch in four phases transfer-only mode, post-only mode, limit-only mode, and finally full-trading. New trading pairs will be OMG/USD, OMG/EUR, OMG/GBP, OMG/BTC.

30th October – CME 6-month Bitcoin futures contracts last trading day

CME’s Bitcoin futures contract, ticker symbol BTC, is a USD cash-settled contract offered to CME brokers and traders based on the CME Crypto Facilities Bitcoin Reference Rate (BRR). The nature of futures contracts means they need to be settled on a predefined date. All contracts will have to be traded, or settled, before this date. There is generally a fall in the trading volume of futures around expiration, which coincides with a rise in volatility and a potential short/long squeeze. Following a recent regulatory clamp down on the BitMEX exchange for violating US AML and KYC laws, CME has risen to become the second-largest Bitcoin futures platform in the world.

Top 10 Crypto Summary

It was a strong week for large-cap assets in the Brave New Coin market cap top 10. The four digital assets named in the PayPal integrations all enjoyed healthy gains, particularly Litecoin (LTC) which surged 24% on the news. In a recent price analysis of LTC, Brave New Coin lead analyst Josh Olszewicz backed the network’s fundamentals indicating that they have been on the rise in recent months after two years of stagnation.

Bitcoin Price Chart

Bitcoin traders enjoyed a week for the ages as the BTC price soared through 12,000 then 13,000 and touched new 18 month highs. On-chain data provider Glassnode reported that on October 24th the number of addresses holding at least 0.01 BTC reached an all-time high of 8,671,968.