Crypto market: no longer bears, but not yet bulls

Over the past 24 hours, Bitcoin adds more than 3% and trades around $3,900. The $4K level is considered by experts as an important resistance, the strong move above could open the way to further entire market growth. The total crypto market capitalization again reached $132 billion. Judging by the confident bulls strike back after the last round of correction, speculators, crypto enthusiasts, and other investors are “probing” coins for a possible increase in the range of growth.

The hardfork in the Ethereum network was successful, the ecosystem works quickly, the block time creation fell back to 12.5 seconds, but miners still feel a certain amount of emptiness, realizing that the PoW era is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

ZCash network difficulty remains near the highs reached at the time of the ASIC mass appearance, the price barely holds the level of $50, and in the case of substantial growth, the miners can massively start selling their ZEC. However, it should be noted that the daily ZCash trading volume increased by 160% to $169 million compared to March last year. As the ZEC price decreased, daily trading volumes grew: in December 2018, after declining to the level around $50, one of the leading anonymous coins attracted trading demand around $150 million per day, whereas, at a price of $200 during summer 2018, daily trading volume fluctuated around $50 million.

Growing demand for cryptocurrencies as their prices fall is quite understandable and will help the industry development. Experts do not expect a new round of explosive market growth in 2019, although they note excellent conditions for investing in the long term. For example, the stock price of Amazon after the collapse of the “dot-com” increased by almost 30,000%. The current situation on the cryptocurrency market is often compared with the events of those years. The only question is which of the coins is new “Amazon” and which is new “Netscape”.

CoinMarketCap index indicates the existence of more than 2,000 cryptocurrencies. Crypto hype spawned a lot of scam projects but the first stage of purification is probably nearing its end. On the basis of regulation and the large capital participation, new projects arise, which are likely to change the balance of power even in the Top-10, while 95% of the remaining coins will be forgotten in a few years. This is an interesting time as we are witnessing a new digital revolution.

Alexander Kuptsikevich, the FxPro analyst