Bitcoin Price Rally Fizzles after Most-Bullish Quarter since 2017

The price of bitcoin (BTC) is going down despite registering its most incredible quarter performance since December 2017. The BTC-to-dollar instrument was trading at $10,875 on Monday, 07:50 UTC, down more than 8.5 percent on a 24-hour adjusted timeframe. The move downhill dragged the bitcoin’s market capitalization close to $193.41 billion. At its highest, the cap […]

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Deutsche Börse’s Xetra Exchange Lists First Blockchain Firm

Xetra, a Deutsche Börse-operated trading venue for financial assets such as stocks and funds, has just listed its first blockchain company.

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Bitcoin Price Under $11,000 As Analysts Prepare For 40% Price Correction

Support at $12,000 failed to hold over the weekend, with sentiment now preferring a roughly 40% retracement.

Bitcoin (BTC) led major cryptocurrencies on a fresh downward spiral July 1 after markets halted support above $12,000.

Market visualization courtesy of Coin360

Data from Coin360 shows bitcoin has lost its grip on the $11,000 mark as of press time, trading around $10,950 having gone as low as $10,680.

Conditions remain volatile this week, with last week’s peak of $13,800 still unchallenged. Now, attention is turning to a long-term retracement, which one analyst claims could bring BTC/USD down to just $6,600. 

Previously, talk was of a lighter correction which would focus on the $9,500 area. Bullish forecasts for further growth also began appearing, with Fundstrat’s Tom Lee leading calls for a new all-time bitcoin price high in 2019.

Now, however, it would appear various factors have converged to put downward pressure on bitcoin. Among them, data shows the supply of stablecoin tether (USDT) has doubled this year; increased tether issuance tends to result in both bitcoin price gains and volatility. 

Josh Rager, the analyst and investor increasingly known for his bitcoin predictions on social media, added to the overall sentiment that the cryptocurrency was about to take a break from its bull run. 

On the plus side, he argued while uploading a fresh BTC price chart, lower levels would provide a fresh opportunity to accumulate coins. 

“Weekly close looks ugly, you'll likely see this shooting star type of doji… Which typically is a signal for reversal & we could see a couple of down weeks for Bitcoin,” he summarized.

Bitcoin 7-day price chart. Source: Coin360

Regardless of price movement, bitcoin’s technical factors continue to impress, with hash rate again reaching an all-time high in recent days. As Cointelegraph previously reported, the statistic provides a reliable indication of the overall health of the bitcoin network. 

After a turbulent week for traders, meanwhile, altcoins again failed to rally on Monday, instead following bitcoin to greet them with yet more losses.

Ethereum (ETH) fell 5.9% to lose support at $300, while the majority of the top twenty cryptocurrencies by market cap saw falls of between 5% and 7%.

Ether 7-day price chart. Source: Coin360

On Friday, as Cointelegraph noted, veteran trader Peter Brandt had warned altcoin markets would likely never recover or even match bitcoin’s price growth, in opposition to behavior during previous bull cycles. 

For Brandt, alts were experiencing their own version of the dot com boom of the early 2000s, and only a few would ultimately prevail.

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First Blockchain Company Gets Listed on Deutsche Börse-Operated Xetra Exchange

German BaaS provider Advanced Blockchain AG has become the first blockchain firm to be listed on Germany’s Xetra digital stock exchange, operated by Deutsche Börse.

German Blockchain-as-a-Service (Baas) provider Advanced Blockchain AG has become the first blockchain development firm to be listed on Germany’s Xetra digital stock exchange, operated by Deutsche Börse. The news was reported by financial news site DGap on July 1.

The Xetra all-electronic trading system was founded in 1997 for use on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, but has since expanded to over 200 trading participants from across16 European countries, as well as Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates. 

According to recent data, Xetra accounted for €131.4 billion ($149 billion) of Deutsche Börse’s total cash markets €146.0 billion ($165 billion) turnover in May 2019, with an average daily Xetra trading volume of €6 billion ($6.79 billion).

According to the report, German financial services holding firm Lang & Schwarz has facilitated Advanced Blockchain AG’s Xetra listing as designated sponsor and market maker. The development follows the firm’s earlier listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in January of this year, as well as its prior listing on the primary market of the Düsseldorf stock exchange.

In parallel to the Xetra news, Advanced Blockchain AG has also signed a Letter of Intent with an as yet undisclosed German telecoms provider to jointly develop a blockchain-based protocol for billing in internet of things (IoT) networks, according to a DGap report published on July 1.

While details of the partnership remain to be finalized and made binding in Q3 2019, DGap reports that their future collaboration will involve the peaq project and Advanced Blockchain AG’s proprietary protocol DAGchain, which uses an AI-powered decentralized consensus algorithm and incorporates proof-of-stake (PoS) elements. 

The finalization will reportedly determine both financial aspects of the partnership as well as the extent of Advanced Blockchain AG’s participation in future transactions on the network.

As previously reported, Deutsche Börse has itself made multiple inroads into the blockchain space, this spring entering into a strategic partnership with Swiss state-owned telecoms firm Swisscom, and Swiss and Singapore-based fintech Sygnum to build out a compliant financial market infrastructure for digital assets. 

In April, telecoms giant NTT Corporation’s Thai subsidiary revealed plans to launch a major innovation lab focused on blockchain, artificial intelligence and IoT technology.

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BIS Chief: Central Banks May Issue Digital Currencies ‘Sooner Than We Think’

The chief of the Bank for International Settlements has acknowledged that central banks will likely soon need to issue their own digital currencies.

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Crypto Whale’s $200 Million Short Triggers 8.5% Bitcoin Price Plunge

On June 30, according to a cryptocurrency trader, a single investor on Bitfinex placed a 20,000 BTC short order, betting more than $200 million that the bitcoin price would go down in the near term. Overnight, the bitcoin price fell from $11,900 to $10,765 as the valuation of the crypto market dropped by well over […]

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‘Bitcoin Time’ Moving Faster Than ‘Internet Time,’ Says Hashcash Inventor Adam Back

Blockstream CEO Adam Back — inventor of the hashcash proof-of-work system — says that “bitcoin time” seems to be running faster than the “internet time” of the early dotcom era.

Blockstream CEO Adam Back — inventor of the hashcash proof-of-work (PoW) system later used in bitcoin’s (BTC) mining algorithm —  says that “bitcoin time” seems to be running faster than the so-dubbed “internet time” of the early dotcom era. 

Back made his remarks during a panel at the Bitcoin 2019 conference in San Francisco on June 26. 

Following a discussion of hashcash’s inception as well as various early electronic money inventions such as digicash, Back noted that bitcoin had broken through with Satoshi’s decentralized vision and his solution to counter hyperinflation by fixing the coin’s supply curve. 

“Bitcoin has come much further and much faster than people expected,” he said. “There was a saying in the early dotcom era about “internet time,” and [...] bitcoin time [...] seems to be moving even faster.”

Back argued that it is pretty challenging — even for the technically adept — to keep up with the pace of new ideas and implementations in the crypto sphere, and that new areas for innovation are yet to be realized:

“Because blockchain and bearer electronic cash is a whole new building block and it has implications with smart contracts. It’s sort of like picking up a new programming language with a new paradigm, and it takes a while for people to natively understand it.”

Alongside smart contracts, Back singled out the fairly recent creation of second layer solutions such as Lightning Network as an area of intense energy and development, as well as state chains — which, he proposed, offer new insight and benefits by allowing for “less implied trust in the operators of a federated chain of some kind.” 

He stressed that for all crypto innovations, trade-offs as regards privacy and security exist, but that incremental improvements — such as Schnorr signatures — continue to be made:

“It strikes me that there are still major discoveries about the implications of the tech being found […] we’re still at early stages for what can be built [...] and it’s surprising the number of things you can build on layers above it that retain interesting properties of what’s beneath.”

Back also likened the space of proliferating crypto assets to “TCIP/IP — so that there’s one interoperable standard and it’s a lingua franca for exchanging value.” 

Emphasizing that innovation can be “adopted in layers,” he proposed that developers could, for example, import “bitcoin’s UTXO set” into “a new and innovative data structure if it’s found.”

As reported, Back gave his insights into blockchain and cryptocurrencies at a G20 meeting last month, noting that he doesn’t see electronic cash at present as being “ large enough to affect monetary policies for major currencies like the euro and Japanese yen.”

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