BTC/USD

Bitcoin closed the day with a red candle on Wednesday, just above the 7k mark. The biggest cryptocurrency could not recover and dropped to $6800 during the intraday trading session on Thursday before going back up to the 7k zone.

The news that Yahoo Finance will be integrating support for trading Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), and Ether (ETH) on their iOS platform did not trigger the desired short-term bull run possibly due to the fact the current Yahoo platform is far from being among the most popular trading tools. Additionally, there were rumors (unconfirmed) mid-week that NASDAQ is still looking to list several coins in 2019 depending on how they will be classified from a regulatory standpoint.

The BTC trading volume remained below 4b during weekdays which compared to previous runs towards 9k and higher, where we had volume of 5b and above, can be considered weak.

We did not see any rapid price changes on Friday when most of the cryptocurrencies were consolidating their higher lows. BTC traders started exiting their positions around 7k and by doing this confirmed this very strong mid-term selling area. The RSI indicator on 4H charts recovered immensely following the latest upside correction, inside a buying sentiment area.

On Saturday BTC/USD pair registered its biggest one-day jump since Monday and closed the day with a solid gain of $200, at $7200, suggesting mid-term target is the psychosocial level of 8k.

Fundstrat’s Tom Lee predicted that stability is required in a major trend reversal and if Bitcoin can continue to sustain stability in the weeks to come, a major mid-term rally is possible by the end of 2018.

BTC/USD currently sits at $7267, 8% up for the week, with a significantly increased trading volume of $7,2b as per Goingecko.

The pair remained in the mid-$6,000 (6200 -6500 to be more specific) corridor long enough and stay above 7k and 7100/200 will require higher volume and trading activity to trigger mid-term recovery.

Expected support around $6800 region although a drop to $6600 region is possible. I think, however, that we escaped that zone and we won’t see any dramatic corrections. Bulls need to turn 7k into a support line to accumulate enough power for an attack of $7300-400. If the $7,100 price holds for one or two weeks, the bulls will return and $10,000 is a likely possibility for EOY.

ETH/USD

Ethereum almost touched the magical $300 mark on Wednesday before dropping back to $283 on Thursday. The most popular altcoin lacked the trading volume increase to fuel short-term recovery and wend down even more on Friday, almost reaching the support at $270 and the dangerous zone between $270-$250.

Business insider report on Friday that CBOE Global Markets, the owner of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and one of the world’s largest exchange holding companies, is looking to launch futures for Ethereum by the end of 2018 (ETH). The futures and options exchange is waiting on the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to give the project the go-ahead before its official launch. The market reacted immediately and ETH/USD pair jumped $21 on Saturday, breaching the $300 resistance line and closing the day at $296.

Or maybe the price is a direct result of the news that Ethereum developers agreed to delay difficulty bomb and reduce block reward by 33%? Ethereum developers, agreed to implement the EIP-1234 — an updated version of Ethereum’s improvement upgrade designed to, among other things, reduce the amount of new ether produced to 2 ETH per block w from the current 3 ETH per block and include the code for such a change into Ethereum’s next hard fork, Constantinople.

The good news here, however, are not the technical aspects themselves, but the fact Ethereum developer community is united and still very, very active.

ETH currently stands at $294, up with 7% for the week and with a 24-hour trading volume of $2,5b. After a volatile week, the top altcoin came close to reclaiming the $300 price point — soaring to an intraday high of around $299.52, before dipping slightly

Ethereum will most probably once again break the $300 price level, but future move upwards depends very much on how BTC behaves and what trading volume we see on ETH come Monday morning. Targets remain the same: 300, 318, 360 up and 270/250 down.

XRP/USD

XRP went down from 0.347 to 0.333 on Thursday and was trading relatively flat on Friday, closing he workweek at 0.335.

On Friday, the Morgan Creek Capital Management of North Carolina, a privately-owned investment management company announced it has launched a cryptocurrency investment fund (only available to accredited investors with minimum investment for $50,000) without including the world’s fourth-most valuable cryptocurrency, XRP. Reason being a large proportion of this currency is held by the Ripple management team, so it is not as decentralized as the other currencies are.

XRP/USD followed the rest of the altcoin and BTC on Saturday and registered significant gains. The Ripple currency broke the 0.34000-0.34270 resistance and closed at 0.347.

The pair currently sits on 0.34200, up with 4.7% for the week. Next target is closing above 0.35. Down I still see support at 0.31 and of course 0.27

Future Blockchain

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