Ether Making a Comeback?: BTCManager’s Week in Review February 20

Is this the start of a bullish market for ETH? The weekly chart below shows for the first time, a Kumo breakout, that is a close outside of the Ichimoku cloud; it is a bullish one with ETH-USD closing above the upper span of the Kumo at $12.26.

The Ichimoku cloud for ETH-USD has only formed recently given the relatively short trading history of the digital asset. The Kumo breakout is a classic Ichimoku signal suggesting ether is entering into a long-term uptrend, with the market tending toward fractal resistance at $14.45.

The Ichimoku cloud should act as a support zone going forward between $12.50 and $10.95 for the week ahead. Volumes have been bullish, rising for four consecutive weeks, and the Awesome Oscillator moves further into positive territory.

However, buyers were not able to hold on to the previous week’s gains entirely. Bears fought back pushing the close down to around $12.80 from the high of $13.58998. Also, at the time of writing, the conversion line (blue) has crossed above the base line (red), but remains flat indicating neutral momentum.

In a blog post released February 17, Tech investor Nick Tomaino evaluated ether using an expected value method. By weighing out certain scenarios based on the likelihood for varying degrees of success for the Ethereum ecosystem, under certain assumptions, we can obtain the expected value of the price of ether.

While Tomaino stated, “I believe that there is an 80 percent chance that the price of ETH is zero within 10 years,” citing security and immutability issues, the probability-weighted intrinsic value of ETH-USD is estimated as $59.75.

This week’s review is compiled from contributions by Alexander Lielacher, Christoph Bergmann, Evan Sixtin, Farzana Begum, Jamie Holmes, Lori Brown, Michael Scott, Nigel Dollentas, and Nuno Menezes.

The price of ether, the cryptocurrency driving the Ethereum blockchain, spiked after JP Morgan announced that it was signing a partnership with Bank Santander and BNY Mellon to develop new solutions using the Ethereum blockchain technology. On February 14, the Ether-Bitcoin exchange rate hit an 82-day high.

Project Oaken, a new startup that has created an Ethereum-based platform for IoT applications. This initiative was awarded $100,000 at a World Government Summit presentation, a Dubai government-sponsored smart governance event, held on February 14. In its proposal for the competition, Project Oaken demonstrated a smart contract use case for automatic toll payments, utilizing a Tesla test vehicle.

Apparently, the financial engineering behind Abra is so complicated that nobody has been told exactly how it works. In an email reply to the author, Barhydt was elusive, “(It’s) too involved to answer via email…The system works, and it works well.” Barhydt has been very secretive about his tech, and during the last few years in which Abra has been in development, he has never given the public a technical explanation of how it works.

BitFlyer, Japan’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, has received $1.75 million from a funding round from Japanese banking giants, including the Mizuho and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Groups as reported by Nikkei on February 14. Other investors include SMBC Venture Capital and Dai-ichi Life Insurance, an outlier in the group of financial institutions.

Cryptopay, a successful Bitcoin brokerage with more than 200,000 active users worldwide, has exited the UK market due to pressures of a banking policy update on February 1, 2017, that prevents British Sterling (GBP) deposits and withdrawals. It is not the first time a company’s or individual’s account in the UK has been shut down relating to bitcoin activity and “updated bank policies.”

There is a new, rising trend in the outskirts of Bitcoin communities, and it has a more charitable spirit than what you might usually read about bitcoin. At Bitvest.io, a bitcoin gaming and investment site, there is a group of people who participated in a remarkable contest during the first week of February.

Like in Bitcoin, Litecoin miners bristle to signal support for the protocol upgrade SegWit. An AMA with Litecoin chief developer Charlie Lee demonstrates how much of the political conflicts of Bitcoin has spilled over into Litecoin – and how far Lee would go to enforce SegWit.

Startups have highlighted a wide range of blockchain use cases through their work on solutions in various industries, ranging from the music industry, land title registration, and cloud computing to cyber security, supply chain management, healthcare, e-voting and the philanthropy sector. Disaster relief is identified as a new area where the blockchain could be put implemented to reduce inefficiencies to streamline a vital process better.