With worldwide politics in disarray, and even the weather seemingly conspiring against humanity… Is it time to take our Bitcoin stash and move into a remote bunker yet?

Bitcoin Price: Finally On The Up Again?

After several weeks of consolidation, it feels like bitcoin price may finally be heading upwards again… until the next dip, that is.

BTC closed out last weekend with little price movement and the lowest daily trading volume in 5 months. However, Monday saw (now almost traditional) gains and before we knew it the price was back into five figures.

But rather than jubilation, analysts were concerned that this might just be another bull trap. After all, we had crossed the $10k mark almost 20 times since July, so why should we believe that this time would stick?

Well, lots of reasons as it turned out, and analyzing monthly lows suggested that our bumpy ride in the $10k region was building a stronger store of value before the next bull rally. We’ve seen the same thing happen three times before when the price has been passing the psychological barrier of adding another digit.

As Thursday became Friday, we saw a concerted push upwards towards $11,000, only to have those gains wiped out by a big red candle. But support held at $10,300, which is $1k up on last week’s support, and the price has continued to creep back upwards since then.

Is a 2017-style bull-run now imminent? The latest Bitcoin futures market data suggest that it might be.

Bitcoin Derivatives Market Feels A Little Derivative

First Binance announced that it would be paying users $220k to test two competing futures platforms to decide which was best. Then it announced that it had acquired Chinese derivatives platform, JEX.

Meanwhile, Bitfinex launched two derivatives ‘perpetual contracts’ with leveraging up to 100x. Whilst this massive leverage seemed similar to derivatives offered by BitMEX, Bitfinex stressed that its tools would mainly be used for hedging rather than gambling. Yep.

And then it appeared that Binance had been a little over-zealous with ctrl-C and ctrl-V, as its futures documentation was a cut and paste of the BitMEX documentation. CZ issued an apology and put it down to the aforementioned JEX, which Binance had acquired.

News In Brief

As one door opens, another one closes… Bitcoin.com launched a new crypto exchange with negative 0.3% trading fees as an introductory offer. Meanwhile, Thailand’s top crypto exchange closed down unexpectedly, with BTC on sale for $9k. Some speculated that it was a victim of bureaucracy.

Ahead of the SEC’s decision next month on its Bitcoin-ETF application, VanEck will start offering a limited version to certain institutional investors.

A mystery $1 billion Bitcoin transaction made the news this week. It seemed most of the value could be traced back to Huobi addresses.

Ripple continued to dump XRP tokens onto the market, giving rise to one petition to make them stop and a spoof petition calling for more dumping. Did the XRP Army need a dump or not?

Earlier this week, we reported that the Tron hype-beast was on the wain, as tweet volumes had fallen 60%, and price wasn’t faring any better. So Tron’s Communications Director appeared to say that the Warren Buffett lunch was definitely just postponed, and would happen… sometimes.

And Finally…

Tron wasn’t the only thing we shook from its slumber with an article this week. On Monday, we also noted that BitMEX and CEO Arthur Hayes was still AWOL from social media.

Well, the very next day Hayes popped back onto the radar, with a tweet from Peru, about a conference he will attend next week. “We will be two-steppin’ straight to $20k,” he proclaimed.

Then the BitMEX Twitter account also flickered back into life to joke that it was, “Glad to see [Binance] enjoyed reading our [futures] documentation as much as we enjoyed writing it!”

You can thank us later…

What do you think of this week’s Bitcoin news roundup? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below!

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