BTC/USD Analysis & Prediction: Price goes up as Apple and Samsung show Bitcoin interest

After two straight days of bearish pullback, Bitcoin finally had a bullish day today. The revelation of Samsung and Apple’s interest in Bitcoin must have fuelled this upward growth. As of now, BTC/USD has gone up from $7,670 to $7,880. We will be doing a technical analysis of the price chart in different time frames to gain a better understanding of the price movement. However, before we do so, let’s look into some of the hottest news surrounding Bitcoin.

Fundamental Analysis

The stories we are going to be looking into are:

Apple adding Bitcoin symbol to its icon set.

Samsung designing Bitcoin mining chips.

chips. Did Bitcoin whales manufacture the recent price dump?

Apple adds Bitcoin symbol, unveils “Cryptokit”

The trillion-dollar tech giants, Apple has finally shown some form of interest towards Bitcoin. Twitter user @brandnanthny tweeted the following photo indicating that Apple has added the Bitcoin symbol to its icon set.

Along with this, Apple is also planning to unveil its “CryptoKit” cryptographic developer package at Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2019. The tool will debut as an update in iOS 13 and will focus primarily on developers, enabling them to build more security functionality for apps with better support.

WWDC’s description read:

“System frameworks encrypt both data at rest and data in transit in a transparent way for you. This functionality is available by simply setting an attribute. However, you may want to do more to protect your users’ data. CryptoKit is a new Swift framework that makes it easier and safer than ever to perform cryptographic operations, whether you simply need to compute a hash or are implementing a more advanced authentication protocol.”

The release of the CryptoKit and the incorporation of the Bitcoin symbol has been looked as positive signs by the Bitcoin community.

Samsung designing Bitcoin mining chips

Charles Song, the general manager for Samsung Foundries China, revealed at the MicroBT M20 conference in Chengdu, China, that the company has been designing and manufacturing 3nm and 5nm chips for Bitcoin mining. As per the company’s internal documents, Samsung has been fabricating these chips since Q1 2018. During the conference in Chengdu, Samsung announced its strategic collaboration with MicroBT, the third largest designer of Bitcoin ASICs behind Bitmain and Canaan. Since Samsung is the second largest semiconductor company in the world, behind Intel, this news wasn’t much of a surprise.

Samsung produced the chips in the M20S WhatsMiner, the latest line of MicroBT devices, which has a hashrate of 68Th/s and power efficiency of 48 watts to the Terahash. To understand how good that is, the Bitmain Antminer S9, the ASIC most commonly used in the industry, has a hashrate of 13.5 Th/s with a power efficiency of 98 W/Th. This means that the M20S five times more powerful and has half the power consumption.

Did Bitcoin whales manufacture the recent price dump?

Apparently, the recent Bitcoin price dump was a result of a whale “manipulating” the market. This is how the dump happened:

First, the whale moved around 25,000 BTC (worth $215 million) to Coinbase. The Whale Alert twitter account corroborated this:

The whale then made the following moves:

An hour after the dump, they move 14,000 BTC (worth $112 million) from Coinbase to another wallet.

40 mins later, a whale moved 11,000 BTC (worth $88 million) from Coinbase to another wallet.

Finally, 15 mins later, the whale moved 10 million USDT from one wallet to another.

So, overall, the whale dumped around 25,000 Bitcoins for $215 million and then repurchased it for $200 million, pocketing $15 million in the process.

While some segments of the community have criticized the whale for their actions, others argued that the activity was simply a result of a free market where the whales are accumulating bitcoin.

Technical Analysis

For our technical analysis, we will be using Trading View’s charts. We will be looking at the following price charts:

Daily.

Weekly.

Monthly.

4-Hour.

2-Hour.

1-Hour.

BTC/USD daily chart

Bulls took the price up from $7,660 to $7,700 this Wednesday.

The price got support from the upward trending line.

The current price is trending below the 20-day simple moving average (SMA 20) curve and above the SMA 50, SMA 100, and SMA 200 curves.

The closest resistance level on the upside lies at $7,800.

The moving average convergence/divergence (MACD) indicator shows that the signal line has diverged further away from the MACD line, indicating increasing bearish momentum.

BTC/USD weekly chart

Despite Wednesday’s bullish movement, Monday and Tuesday have been so bearish that this week’s candlestick is still in the red.

Over the week, the price has gone down from $8,729.50 to $7,700, charting an 11.80% decrease in value.

The relative strength index (RSI) indicator has crept back from the overbought zone into the neutral zone and is currently trending at 66.11.

The Elliot oscillator shows seven consecutive bullish sessions with increasing intensity.

BTC/USD 4-hour chart

The 4-hour price failed at the $7,830 level and went down to $7,695 over the next two sessions.

The SMA 100 crossed over the SMA 20 curve which is a bearish sign.

The widening of the 20-day Bollinger band shows increasing market volatility.

The RSI indicator is trending right next to the oversold territory at 32.06.

The signal line is looking to coverage with the MACD line, showing decreasing bearish momentum.

BTC/USD 2-hour chart

As the markets opened this Wednesday, the price was trending in an upwards channel formation, before it hit resistance at the SMA 20 curve. Since then, the 2-hour price is trending along the curve.

The market is trending below the SMA 20, SMA 50, SMA 100, and SMA 200 curves.

The SMA 100 and SMA 50 curves have crossed over the SMA 20 curve, while the SMA 200 curve has crossed over the SMA 50 curve, which are all bearish signs.

The latest session was extremely bearish, which took the 2-hour price to $7,674.

The 20-day Bollinger band’s narrowing jaw indicates decreasing market volatility.

The RSI indicator went back inside the neutral zone from the oversold territory this Wednesday and is currently trending around 36.85.

BTC/USD 1-hour chart

The 1-hour BTC/USD price is currently trending below the red Ichimoku cloud.

The 1-hour chart forms a triangle formation from which the price has had a bearish breakout.

The price currently finds support on the $7,675 line.

Before breaking past the triangle formation, the 1-hour price chart was trending horizontally for nine straight sessions.

The Elliot oscillator shows that the sentiment of the 1-hour market is extremely bearish.

Future Behaviour

Currently, it looks like the market is still trying to recover from the recent downward trend. However, certain well-known names in the space are pretty bullish about the asset’s future behavior. Head of Civic, Vinny Lingham, sometimes known as the “Oracle of Bitcoin,” because of his accurate predictions, believes that Bitcoin will go past $10,000. Lingham tweeted:

“This BTC action looks aggressive. Makes me think that we may blow through $10k and test $12k very soon, but $12k is a very heavy resistance level, so I would expect consolidation around the $10k level for some time if $12k is (likely) rejected.”

Galaxy Digital head Michael Novogratz has a more cautious prediction. He believes that BTC will consolidate between $7,000 – $10,000.