Bitcoin and Ether Market Update: August 08, 2019

Total crypto market cap added $17.7 billion to its value since Monday, August 5 and now stands at $308.9 billion. Top ten coins are mostly flat for the last 24 hours with BINANCE Coin (BNB) and Monero (XMR) being the best performers with 9.1 and 4.2 percent of increase respectively. At the time of writing bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $11,895 on the Bitstamp daily chart, while ether (ETH) stands at $225 and Ripple’s XRP fell to $0.307.

BTC/USD

Bitcoin regained its position above $11,000 on Sunday, August 4 and for the first time since July 14 closed above this mark. It ended the week 21 percent higher compared to the previous seven-day period.

The BTC/USD pair opened the trading session on Monday, August 5, with a solid green candle on the daily chart. The move to $11,840 resulted in a 7.6 percent of price increase.

Bulls were already eyeing the crucial levels around $12,000 and on August 6 managed to push the coin all the way up to $12,340.  Although they were rejected hard at that level and allowed a drop to $11,450 at close, the good performance of the most popular cryptocurrency in the recent days suggested we might be witnessing the beginning of a new mid-term bull trend.

Additionally, most of the crypto experts agree that the escalation of the trade war between China and the United States, combined with the US stock markets turmoil and Federal Reserve rate cuts, might be adding additional fuel to the BTC engine.

On Wednesday, August 7, bitcoin registered another good session and moved up to $12,000.

The United States Federal Reserve (FED) announced on August 5, its plans to develop a real-time, round the clock payment and settlement system. According to the official press release, the new service, which will be called FedNow will “enable the near-instantaneous transfer of funds day and night, weekend and weekdays”.

Binance, one of the biggest and most popular cryptocurrency exchanges in the world denied recent rumors that it suffered a KYC (Know Your Customer) data security breach. Earlier this week, customer-related documents, photos and ID’s started appearing on Telegram. According to the company and its founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the shared data is inconsistent and most probably related to a data leak from 2018 when the KYC service was managed by a third party. The investigation is still ongoing as Binance security team is trying to isolate the source of the issue.

ETH/USD

The Ethereum Project token remained relatively flat on the last day of the previous week and closed at $223 with a 6.2 percent increase for the period.

The coin is in a short-term bull trend since July 28 when it last visited the $200 support line. Since then it showed steady progress and on Monday, August 5 managed to finally break above $230. It added 4 percent to its value and climbed up to $232.

The ETH/USD bulls, however, could not hold their positions and even though the ether was trading as high as $240 during the intraday session on August 6, at the end of the day it fell back down to $225.

On Wednesday, August 7, we saw a volatile trading session during which the Ethereum token was trading in the $219-$231 range just to close flat at $225.