This Week in Crypto

Financial assets, currencies, utility tokens, commodities or something entirely new! Whatever they are, cryptocurrencies are hard to ignore now. Over the last 16 months, they have now recorded bigger swings than "other" stocks, bonds, commodities, and traditional currencies.

The combined market cap for all cryptocurrencies is now above $460 billion -- and above $425 billion for the most part of the week -- and the volume is $30 billion since yesterday. Although the volume fell to $22 billion levels on Saturday after recording highs of $41 billion last week Thursday, it is back up, reaching $33 billion on Monday this week. The volume is on a general upward trend considering that it barely hit above $20 billion in the last two or three months.

Excluding Bitcoin, the same upward trend remains for many altcoins, which now have a combined market cap of $290 billion -- remaining above $270 billion for the better part of this week -- and a volume of $20 billion. Market cap was below $150 billion and volume was as low as $6 billion this time last month for altcoins, and so has been going up.

Cardano led the top tens in the total percentage gains last seven days to date with over 23 percent gain, while Ethereum has shot up by 20 percent in the last seven days to take the second position. IOTA, which gained by last week shot by 19 percent, followed by NEO at 13 percent. Bitcoin tailed at 5 percent gain.

Cardano just announced two testnets alongside major advancements in providing a provably secure Proof of Stake protocol. With the latest version of Cardano just announced two testnets alongside major advancements in providing a provably secure Proof of Stake protocol, parties can bootstrap the blockchain from the genesis block. This would allow users of the network to enter the blockchain without any previous knowledge of active participants or chain history. The testnets are K-EVM (May 28) and IELE.

With K-EVM, developers will have more capable tools to analyze the code. IELE will provide developers with a collection of compiler and toolchain technologies based on the modular principles of LLVM. The testnets advance the platform's smart contracts that would allow for side chains, support for multiple currencies on a single ledger and see role out of Cardano's general purpose smart contract programming languages Plutus and Marlow.

The rest of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin Cash, Ripple, EOS, Litecoin, and Stellar, gained by less than 10 but they were all positives.

EOS, which was top last week among the top ten cryptos amidst reports of upcoming releasing of mainnet, is in panic and lost 10 percent in the last 24 hours and trading at $17 per coin.

Where are markets headed?

Bitcoin shot above $9, 700 Friday and other cryptocurrencies are back on a bullish trend. Bitcoin run into strong resistance at the 23.6% Fibonacci level on the weekly chart and has now managed a three-week rally to the current position.

It is very much likely that the prices for many cryptocurrencies will continue rising in the short term. This movement will likely be propelled by poor liquidity but that does not signify a new medium-term bull market according to a trader Tom Luongo. Again, a few more investors appear to be returning the space.

Without considering the short-term gains (daily and weekly), the long term charts -- including monthly and quarterly charts are very bullish.

He says he would be comfortable calling a longer-term trending move if Bitcoin gets through the resistance around $9,270 and push towards $11,300, which is the 38.2% Fibonacci line. According to him, the market is now stopping the bearish trend after the tax season forced a lot of liquidations and force out the weakest hands.

Luongo advises investors to consider coins/tokens they have operational and develop confidence in that have put in the strong bottom or double-bottom formations in 2018 that is below the Fibonacci level (23.6%) as traced from their December high to their Q1 low. These coins are likely to out-perform the rest of the market. He is of the opinion that investors should review or jettison from their portfolio, any crypto still flirting with its Q1 low without a strong development roadmap.

Meanwhile, Viktor Shpakovsky, who is a co-founder at The Token Fund, believes that the market is responding calmly now negative news. For instance, the prices did not drop this week after news that Mt. Gox trustee may resume cryptocurrency sales, and in response to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin's boycott of the major Consensus Conference and refusal to release frozen Parity funds due to the vulnerability of multiple smart contracts of ERC-20 tokens.

Shpakovsky says the downward trend appears to be over given the intensive short selling and rising activity in Bitcoin network with the number of transactions increasing up to 200,000 and even 250,000 in 24 hours. He believes we should be expecting some price increases including the possibility of Bitcoin soon reaching resistance levels that looked unsurpassable in February and March.

Kiana Danial from Investing.com also says the price could go up to first reach $11,525 and even $13,535 respectively in May before pullbacks in the levels of $6,000 and $5,000 resume and then more new upward trends.

She supported the fact that the market is recovering with Bitcoin showing a bullish signal at above daily Ichimoku cloud in the technical analysis.

However, GP Bullhound is warning that many institutional investors are already into crypto with the intention of cashing in on the action that brought Bitcoin up to $20,000 in December last year. They are ready to and the report from the company warns that cryptocurrencies could suffer massive correction as a result.

For instance, their entry, according to the report, could lead more retail players to buy in at extremely high prices and this would later send the market crashing. This would definitely be greatly useful information for anyone single investor to time a perfect exit when the right time comes.

The report, however, alludes to the fact that the ICO environment is more mature now and after many scams, many people would choose to first see products before buying in. This, the report says, is a positive trend that could see prices spike.

News from the markets

Other news this week include the fact that South Korea could soon make it legal for startups to raise money through ICOs instead of having to move abroad to do so. This is after the Democratic Party of Korea proposed a new bill to that effect. However, ICOs would be under tight supervision by the Financial Services Commission (FSC) and the Ministry of Science and ICT.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs has officially announced it will open a crypto trading desk (Bitcoin contracts based on Bitcoin prices) and although the date is not set yet, it could be starting to trade in the coming weeks. Although the move will likely help markets for cryptocurrencies, it might appear to be some form of increased crypto acceptance and institutionalization.

Unfortunately, by end of this week, as it was, crypto earned another critic in the name of Bill Harris, the CEO of Paypal Holdings. He now says that Bitcoin is a "colossal pump-and-dump scheme" and indeed a scam. This came even as Bitcoin miners neared at tapping the 17 millionth Bitcoin!

In other news, Ethereum, which is facing classification as a security by SEC, hopes SEC will see the light and reject the classification given its heavily decentralized nature. This is according to the Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin Cash is now listed on the London Block Exchange -- alongside Ethereum Classic. Bitcoin Cash has been extending merchant adoption and listing on many exchanges in the recent past in as much as Ripple has been seeking several partnerships in the cross-border payment industry. Users of Litecoin will soon be able to make payments and trade dozens of altcoins in exchange for Litecoin, using Wirex – a provider of crypto debit cards. Wirex will be integrating Litecoin into its blockchain payment cards.

Also, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, predicted yesterday that Ethereum would reach $15,000 by end of this year and that crypto prices would go "to the moon". He is now concentrating on Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm founded with Y Combinator ex-partner Garry Tan.

He said that although many projects on the blockchain are just a hype, the future of the internet depends on distributed ledger technology. Initialized Capital recently invested $2.1 million in security-focused decentralized ERC20 token exchange DDEX. Reddit, which suspended Bitcoin payments recently, also said this week that they might resume the payments.

Other news is that Mobi, which aims at using blockchain technology to make mobility safer, greener and more affordable, has new partners in IOTA. This is in addition to Ford, BMW, GM and Renault that will be connecting to MOBI.

Their decentralized system will be a place where partners can share driving data, manage ride-share and car-share transactions, as well as store vehicle identity and usage information. It will enable supply chain tracking, facilitate autonomous machine and vehicle payments, secure mobile commerce, establish data markets for autonomous and human driving and introduce usage-based mobility pricing (as well as payment for vehicles, insurance, energy, congestion, pollution, and infrastructure).

Further, there are rumors that Telegram, which raised $1.7 billion by selling newly created cryptocurrency TON to fewer than 200 private investors, is canceling its public ICO.