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Source: bitcoinrecent.com
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Critical Bitcoin Weekly Close Approaches as Analysts Foresee Turbulence
Bitcoin has flashed some signs of weakness over the past few hours as it begins trending downwards.
This decline has led it to a key support level, which comes as its critical daily and weekly candle closes fast approach.
How it reacts to this level before these candles close could set the tone for which direction it trends in the weeks and even months ahead, as a firm breakdown from here could further confirm that the five-figure price region is simply insurmountable for buyers.
It is important to note that all hope is not lost for Bitcoin, even if it breaks below its support at $9,400.
Analysts are now pointing to a few factors as reasons why the crypto’s mid-term outlook still remains bright.
Following Bitcoin’s recent rejection at $10,400, the cryptocurrency has been showing some signs of strength due to buyers’ ability to guard against this sparking any type of downtrend.
It does appear that this strength is in jeopardy of being erased, however, as BTC is now approaching its key multi-week support level at $9,400.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading down roughly 2% at its current price of $9,475. This marks a tempered decline from daily highs of roughly $9,700.
The last time BTC dipped to this price region was on Thursday, but the movement proved to be short-lived as buyers quickly absorbed the selling pressure and boosted BTC higher.
If this level is broken below, the next key support levels to watch for sit around $9,100 and $8,800. A break below both of these would be grim for the benchmark cryptocurrency’s mid-term outlook.
Analysts are noting that they expect the cryptocurrency to see some turbulence today due to the looming weekly candle close.
One trader is noting that he still expects bulls to prevail over bears due to BTC’s ability to maintain above its cloud formation.
“Sunday, expecting turbulence. Looking at the cloud as long as daily continuously closes above the greater trend is bullish,” he said while pointing to the chart seen below.
There is a key horizontal support region that analysts also believe Bitcoin must hold above in order for it to see any further upwards momentum.
Another popular pseudonymous trader spoke about this region in a tweet, explaining that he is closely watching to see if BTC is able to hold above the $9,100 to $9,300 area.
He explains that its market structure remains bullish so long as it holds above this level.
“Bitcoin: Looking at something like this in which I find the $9,100-9,300 area to be a substantial zone to hold. Beneath that and we could have further retracements, but, overall, structure is still upwards trending,” he explained.
Source: www.newsbtc.com
Cole Petersen
Report: China Prefers EOS and TRON to Bitcoin
Well, here’s something you don’t see every day. Bitcoin outranked by another coin… You may not believe it, but in China, that appears to be the case.
China has put out a list of its top digital currencies. It’s strange considering how strong of a presence bitcoin holds in the country, but according to the Center for Information and Industry Development (CCID) of China, bitcoin is only the 12th best coin available to traders. This is in sharp contrast to many other regions, which often place the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market cap in the number one spot or at least in the top five.
To be fair, this new ranking for bitcoin is about two positions higher than where it was last year. The CCID releases an annual report known as the CCID Global Public Chain Technology Evaluation Index. The document ranks all the top cryptocurrencies across the globe in terms of their innovation, usefulness, how smoothly their code updates go, how easy they are for developers to work with, and their support for blockchain applications. In addition, the coins also get points for how “creative” they are.
Last year, bitcoin came in 14th place, while this year, it has moved up two spots. Perhaps this is something to be grateful for, but at the same time, 12th place is still relatively low for a coin that gave birth to an entirely new financial industry.
The top-ranking coins on the list are TRON and EOS, which took the number two and number one positions, respectively. The third highest-ranking coin is Ethereum, while spots four and five are taken up by IOST and Link. The placement of these coins is interesting in that TRON and EOS come out ahead of Ethereum. These two currencies are often looked upon today as blockchains that are faster and superior to Ethereum, even though the latter offers smart contract capabilities.
Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap and the number one competitor to bitcoin. At one time, the currency was the most popular amongst developers for establishing new decentralized applications (dapps) and currencies, though over the years, the blockchain has attracted so much attention and activity that it has gotten heavily bogged down. The network is shackled with high gas fees, slow transaction times and congestion.
The problem has gotten so bad that co-creator Vitalik Buterin has stated that Ethereum is no longer scalable. He has announced the release of Ethereum 2.0, which will transfer the coin from a proof of work (PoW) to a proof of stake (PoS) module, which he believes will make the network much faster and far more efficient.
Until then, however, it appears TRON and EOS are new enough that they can take over where Ethereum left off. Many developers have flocked to these networks over the past year to create their projects.
Tags: bitcoin, china, EOS, Ethereum, TRON
Source: www.livebitcoinnews.com
Author: Nick Marinoff ·
3 Reasons Why DeFi Tokens Are Outperforming Bitcoin Price
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been a rapidly growing sector in the crypto space and although the volume of the DeFi ecosystem yet to surpass that of the general crypto market, the new way of lending and saving has garnered positive media coverage and “praise”.
DeFi shows great promise and the market is starting to reflect this, as many DeFi-based tokens have been pumping strongly in 2020, with some tokens showing gains above 60% in the past 5 days.
According to a report provided to Delphi Digital’s clients, tokens for popular apps in the DeFi space have been showing great gains in the long and short terms periods. For example, Aave, a London-based DeFi lending platform, strongly outperformed Bitcoin this week with a 66.46% gain over the past week. MakerDAO, another popular DeFi-based token, also gained 25.60% in the last week.
DeFi Tokens performance. Source: Delphi Digital
Decentralized exchange (DEX) tokens like Kyber, Loopring and Bancor prices have also risen by double-digits. Although this general growth in the DeFi space comes with thin trading volume when compared to Bitcoin’s (BTC) daily trading volume, it still begs the question, what is making these assets’ prices rally in such an accentuated way?
Much like Bitcoin, the Ethereum network has been dealing with some scalability issues which can affect DeFi’s growth to a great extent, given that the majority of activity occurs on the Ethereum blockchain.
However, the plan for Ethereum has always been to deal with these issues in a multi-stage way. Ethereum 2.0. is the next update for the cryptocurrency and it is probably the most important yet.
The update is expected to occur sometime this summer, and as Jon Jordan, the communications director at DappRadar explained, it will have a great impact on the entire Ethereum ecosystem including the DeFi space. Jordan told Cointelegraph:
“Two of the main obstacles to making dapps on Ethereum easier to understand and use are gas fees and slow block times. Ethereum 2.0 will fundamentally solve these, making Ethereum dapps feel much more like using the standard web and mobile apps we’re all used to.”
While Ethereum 2.0. will bring sharding and staking solutions which are meant to solve many of the network’s current and future problems, the solution will only be fully implemented by 2021 or later, as Phase 2 of the upgrade must be released.
The upcoming implementation of Phase 0 is not expected to have a huge impact on the network, however, the first release of Ethereum 2.0. staking may be reason enough for investors to feel bullish.
As Cointelegraph reported, interaction with the Ethereum network through simple transactions or smart contracts has recently hit an all-time high. The overall use of gas on the network has been rising since the beginning of 2020, according to Delphi Digital.
According to ETH Gas Station, USDT and various decentralized exchanges have been the leaders when it comes to gas usage. Consequently, DEX tokens have outperformed centralized exchange tokens like Binance (BNB) and Bitfinex (LEO), according to a recent report by Messari.
DEX tokens outperform centralized counterparts five fold. Source: Messari
Although gas usage is at an all-time high, the sheer number of transactions is not. This shows that DeFi and other dapps are gaining traction within the Ethereum network in terms of actual use. An increase in use case s of DeFi networks may explain why these tokens are posting price gains.
In fact, Aave, is the biggest winner in the last week and also has the second largest amount of funds locked with $81 million deposited.
Data shows the DeFi sector has significantly outperformed Bitcoin in the last week and the last three months even as institutional interest in BTC reached a new all-time high.
However, DeFi tokens are also becoming an increasingly interesting investment vehicle, allowing high-yield farming through lending and an increase in value locked in lending apps.
Total Value Locked (USD) in DeFi. Source: DeFi Pulse
According to Evgeny Yurtaev, founder of the Zerion DeFi project, DeFi seems to be growing exponentially. Yurtaev recently shared a graphic on Twitter showing the number of new assets almost doubled in the last month, having reached over 1,000 for the first time ever.
New DeFi assets per month.
Not only has the overall activity and number of projects grown, the number of DeFi users has also reached new all-time highs near 600,000, according to data from Dune Analytics.
Ethereum DeFi users over time. Source: Dune Analytics
While growing adoption is a great sign for dapps and for Ethereum as a whole, it also reveals some pressing issues in Ethereum, especially when it comes to congestion and scalability. The growth in price can maybe be looked at as a bet in Ethereum 2.0. and its capacity to fix these issues in the coming years.
However, Cointelegraph has also reported on the effect of Ethereum 2.0. on DeFi, particularly on how staking may take over lending, an unlikely yet loomingdanger for DeFi in the coming years. When asked about this, Stani Kulechov, a CEO at Aave — an Ethereum-based DeFi app — told Cointelegraph:
“It’s hard to tell at this point, it really depends on the incentives. If the incentives for securing the network are higher than depositing to Aave and earning yield, then yes. It might be so that as the network becomes secure, the incentives become lower, so lending might be a way to compete with ETH 2.0 staking. Time will tell.”
The first iteration of Ethereum 2.0. may continue to spark bullish sentiment for DeFi and this may change in the future if staking becomes extremely profitable.
Both concepts are always likely to co-exist even if staking becomes the most popular of the two. For now, there is much to look forward to in Ethereum 2.0. and the DeFi space.
Source: bitcoin.marketing