TL;DR it’s back to the waiting game for now.

With Consensus over and the uplift in price failing to materialise, bitcoin is stagnating on mediocre volumes. There is no clear trend, with the market drifting sideways and gently oscillating between recent highs and lows. The price failed to push through $10k a couple of weeks back, and also failed to pierce $8k subsequently. At the time of writing it sits around $8,300.

It’s worth drawing attention once again to Fundstrat’s widely-published prediction of all-time highs on the back of the major bitcoin and blockchain conference. Fundstrat’s analyst Tom Lee stated that the event would be a catalyst for price rises, as it had been for the past three years. In the event, that rise has not occurred — in fact, bitcoin lost 10% during the conference. Lee, however, stands by his forecast of $25,000 by the end of the year, despite admitting he was wrong about Consensus: https://www.ccn.com/25000-in-2018-bitcoin-bull-tom-lee-sticks-to-strong-forecast-despite-failed-prediction/

There is little news to push bitcoin out of its current malaise. Adoption continues, with institutions exploring the currency but many still reluctant to take the first step due to continuing lack of regulatory clarity. Institutional buy-in is most likely to be the next driver of price increase.

One point of interest over the last week has been Tether. Things have gone quiet around USDT and Bitfinex, which dominated headlines at the end of last year. Two days ago, Tether minted 250 million new USDT — an event that has previously correlated with bitcoin rallying. It’s the first printing event in two months, with the previous one on 21 March taking place almost two months after the one before that. We’ll be looking at this again in another article, but for now we’ll reiterate our position that we believe that Tether is backed by real dollars, it’s just that the way the dollars were acquired is likely rather shady: http://telegra.ph/Tether-could-be-guilty-of-perpetrating-a-huge-fraud-just-not-the-one-we-think-02-01

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