Crypto Market Forecast: W/C 7th September 2020

Bitcoin (BTC) fell by ~11% over the course of the week and ends it just above the $10,000 price level. The Bitcoin price touched as high as $12,032 on Tuesday before big pullbacks on Wednesday and Thursday.The Ethereum price (ETH) and XRP price (XRP) fell by 16% and 14% respectively, and the overall market cap for cryptographic assets fell by ~11%.

A factor in the price drop was miners choosing to cash out after the early week gains. Data provider CryptoQaunt reported “unusually large” BTC outflows from the wallets of major crypto mining pools Poolin, Slush, and HaoBTC that correlated with the price drops. Some of this crypto was sent to exchanges suggesting opportunistic profit-taking from the pool operators.

Data from Blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis also showed a sharp spike in BTC exchange inflows on September 2nd, the highest increase in 37 days, indicating that market traders may have also been seeking to shift out of BTC to realize profits. Phillip Gradwell, chief economist at Chainalysis, has suggested that selling pressure may not have fully worked through as trade intensity data shows that a number of sellers were not able to find buyers.

Also last week, South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb was raided by police in a major search and seizure operation. Local newspaper Seoul Shinmun reported that the seizure was related to investment fraud following Bithumb’s pre-sale of ~USD25 million of BXA tokens. The exchange had issued the tokens as part of a proposed acquisition of blockchain consortium BK but ended up never listing them after the deal fell through. BXA pre-sale investors allege the non-listing of the tokens lead to losses. Bithumb chairman Lee Jung Hoon has also been under police investigation for transferring assets abroad and not reporting it.

This is the second time in as many weeks a major South Korean exchange has faced police raids. Local news outlets reported on August 26th that Coinbit was also raided by police on suspicion of fraud. It is reported that the exchange allegedly faked over 99% of its trading volume and manipulated prices to earn unfair profits.

Crypto news for the week ahead

7th September – UMA tokens launch for trading on Coinbase

The UMA Protocol (UMA) is a decentralized financial contract platform that specializes in powering priceless synthetic tokens, which are collateral-backed ERC20 tokens. Coinbase has announced that it will begin trading UMA tokens on September 8th as long as liquidity conditions are met. Trading will launch with UMA/USD, UMA/BTC, UMA/EUR, and UMA/GBP pairs. UMA outperformed the rest of the market last week rising by ~6% in value.

10th September – Ampleforth Beehive v2 launch

Elastic money solution Ampleforth (AMPL) launches the next version of its incentive program for liquidity providers this Thursday. Beehive v1 offers yields of up to 174% APY for users and almost USD100,000 has been deposited into the program. To earn incentives, AMPL and ETH need to be deposited into a Uniswap liquidity pool, users then earn UWETHAMPL-V2 Liquidity Provider (LP) tokens which can then be deposited into the Beehive V2 incentive pool or geyser, where they are locked and earn interest. The price of AMPL has risen by ~4% in the last month.

Top 10 Crypto Summary

It was a difficult week for large-cap assets on the Brave New Coin Market Cap top 10 with many accruing double-digit losses. Risks associated with trading tokens connected to Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem came to light last week as Chefnomi, the anonymous developer behind the yield farming focused Sushiswap decentralized exchange shocked the community by selling all of his holdings of the platform’s native SUSHI tokens. This caused the price of the token to drop by over 50%.

Bitcoin Price Chart

Bitcoin traders have faced a bearish start to September, a historically difficult trading month for the asset. Despite the losses, the week ended strongly with evident buying support at the USD10,000 price level. A recent tweet from Brave New Coin analyst Josh Olszewicz suggests a possible bullish divergence for the Bitcoin price given the Relative Strength Index (RSI), Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD), and volume technical indicators.