Etiket: Venusbet

Bitcoin’s (BTC) post-Fed price drop to $96,000 has activated a crucial contrary indicator that has historically marked the end of price pullbacks.

On Wednesday, the Fed cut the benchmark borrowing cost as expected but penciled in only two rate cuts for 2025, down from four projected in September. The central bank stressed that it’s not interested in participating in a potential government plan to build a strategic BTC reserve.

Since then, BTC has dropped over 8%, hitting lows near $96,000 at one point. As of writing, the cryptocurrency changed hands near $97,500, down nearly 10% from the record high of $108,266 reached early this week, CoinDesk data show.

The losses have caused the 50-hour simple moving average (SMA) to dip below the 200-hour SMA, confirming a bearish crossover. The pattern suggests that the ongoing pullback could evolve into a deeper one, although it has failed to live up to its reputation during the recent bull run.

Bitcoin has experienced a few pullbacks during its post-U.S. election rally from $70,000 to over $100,000, and each of these dips has ended with a bearish crossover of the 50- and 200-hour SMAs.

The latest crossover, therefore, offers hope to bulls expecting a renewed move into six figures above $100,000.

BTC’s hourly charts. (TradingView/CoinDesk)

A potential bounce could face resistance near $10,600, a level identified by the descending trendline, representing the recent price drop. A violation there would open doors for record highs.

It’s important to remember that patterns don’t always play out as expected, and the contrary indicator discussed above may fail, potentially leading to a deeper drop. The first sign of trouble will be if prices move below the overnight low of $96,000, which could expose the swing low of around $91,000 recorded on Dec. 5.

Bitcoin (BTC) mining economics continued to improve this month, as the hashprice, a measure of daily profitability, rose 5% from the end of November, JPMorgan (JPM) said in a research report Monday.

The hashprice increased as the rally in the world’s largest cryptocurrency outpaced the rise in the network hashrate, the report said. The hashrate is a proxy for competition in the industry and mining difficulty.

The network hashrate has increased 6% month-to-date to an average of 773 exahashes per second (EH/s), the bank noted.

“We note miners earned about $57,300 in daily block reward revenue per EH/s over the first two weeks of December,” analysts Reginald Smith and Charles Pearce wrote, adding that this is the highest level in the last seven months, but is still about 40% below pre-halving levels.

The combined hashrate of the fourteen U.S.-listed miners the bank tracks has increased almost 94% year-to-date to 222 EH/s and now accounts for around 29% of the global network, the bank said.

The total market cap of the miners the bank tracks fell 4% or $1.5 billion, having increased more than 50% following the U.S. presidential election.

The bank estimated that the U.S.-listed miners are currently trading on about two times their proportional share of the four-year block reward opportunity.

Read more: Bitcoin Mining Profitability Improved in November, JPMorgan Says

Fuel, a layer-2 network built on Ethereum, has announced that airdrop claims for its native token will open on Dec. 19, with ten percent of the total supply being allocated to more than 200,000 eligible wallets.

The window for airdrop claims will run for one month. 28% of the airdrop allocation will go to phase-1 pre-depositors, 20% to those who used the Fuel bridge, and 12.5% to “NFT connoisseurs.”

Fuel claims to be the fastest and least expensive rollup on Ethereum. It boasts a transaction processing speed of up to 600 TPS at around $0.0002 per transaction. Fuel achieves this via parallelization, state minimization and interoperability. For comparison, Arbitrum, the largest layer-2 by TVL, has averaged 27.6 TPS over the past 24 hours, while Base is averaging around 90 TPS, according to L2BEAT data.

The token will have a maximum supply of 10 billion and users on the network can still earn “points” for Fuel phase 2, which can eventually be converted to the FUEL token.

Fuel’s block explorer shows that it has processed 154,000 transactions over the past 24 hours and has 63 active decentralized applications (dapps).

Stablecoin infrastructure platform BVNK has raised $50 million in Series B funding as it seeks to expand its U.S. operations.

Formed in late 2021, BVNK raised $40 million in Series A funding the following May and won registration in Spain a few months later.

For the past year, the London-based company has been expanding in the U.S., opening an office in San Francisco, building a team and applying for operational licenses.

BVNK has applied for licenses in all U.S. states, securing approval in several, including Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Michigan and New Hampshire, the company told CoinDesk in an e-mail.

The latest investment round was led by Haun Ventures and included contributions from Coinbase Ventures and Tiger Global, BVNK said on Tuesday.

The company aims to help businesses incorporate stablecoin payments into their processes, such as paying contractors worldwide, instant settlement with merchants and sending payouts without delays and exchange-rate risks.

BTC’s rise to record highs earlier this week is expected to allow miners to extend their November profitability into December, according to a report by investment bank Jefferies on Wednesday.

Bitcoin mining economics improved in November as the average price of bitcoin was 31% higher while the average network hashrate rose by almost 4%, the report said.

The hashrate, representing the total computing power dedicated to a network, is a proxy for competition in the industry and mining difficulty.

“Average daily revenue per exahash was $55,649, which represented a 20.7% month-on-month increase,” analysts Jonathan Petersen and Jan Aygul wrote.

U.S.-listed miners mined less bitcoin in November than the previous month, the bank said. Still, they mined more on a “network basis,” accounting for 24.7% of the total network.

The bank noted that uptime improved, which could be partly due to colder temperatures as winter approaches.

MARA Holdings (MARA) mined the most bitcoin, with 907 in November, and CleanSpark (CLSK) was second, with 622, the report noted.

MARA’s installed hashrate remained the largest in the sector at 46.1 exahashes per second (EH/s), followed by CleanSpark at 33.7 EH/s, the report added.

Read more: Bitcoin Mining Economics Continued to Improve in December, JPMorgan Says

EMBARGOED UNTIL 19 DECEMBER 2024 @ 9:00 AM ET

Blockchain security firm Blockaid said a full 59% of crypto tokens introduced this year were “malicious in nature.”

The number of nefarious tokens being sold into the open market ties in with the rising memecoin narrative that has been consistent throughout this cycle.

There are now 10 memecoins with a market cap of $1 billion or greater and this relative success has led to copycat tokens being launched on Ethereum, Base and Solana among other chains.

Rug-pull scams remain a prevalent threat, making up 27% of malicious tokens, Blockaid said.

It’s worth noting, however, that the amount lost to cryptocurrency hacks and scams shrank dramatically. The FBI said that in 2023, $5.6 billion was lost to crypto scams, while this year the total is $1.4 billion, according to Blockaid’s report.

Blockaid’s data stems from an on-chain detection and response (ODR) platform that processed 2.41 billion transactions, 780 million dapp connections, and 220 million tokens in 2024.

Michael Saylor’s decades-old software development firm MicroStrategy blazed the path for corporate bitcoin purchases beginning in 2020. Through massive securities sales, he’s managed to fund the purchase of billions of dollars worth of bitcoin for his company. Tesla and Block dabbled in the strategy in years past. After the ugly crypto winter put a damper on that, in 2024, other publicly traded companies like Semler Scientific copied the idea. Is it a fad like adding “Blockchain” to corporate names in the 2010s to juice stock returns, or is hoarding bitcoin on balance sheets (including the U.S. government’s) something enduring? Saylor has bought the original crypto through thick and thin, so the test will be whether the trend persists beyond the current red-hot moment following Donald Trump’s election. But there’s no denying Saylor’s laser eyes sparked something.

This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here [ADD LINK BEFORE PUBLISHING].