Cryptocurrency Market Looking Moderately Optimistic

BTC’s advantage continues to decline, having now reached 66.7%. At the same time, the number of coins with capitalization of over $1B has also declined and is now standing at 11. XRP with its profitability rate of over 9.5% remained the leader in growth over the past week. At that, all 10 coins with capitalization of over $1B finished the week at a profit. All except BTC.

XPR’s up by over 9.5%

Last week delivered several good news for XRP, which allowed the third currency in terms of capitalization to continue its growth, noticeably getting ahead of other altcoins. 

One of the first growth drivers was the news that Ripple bought out a crypto trading firm Algrim. This is a sign that Ripple is expanding its geography by launching its operations in Iceland. Next, CZ reported the new opportunity to trade XRP at high liquidity for BinanceChain and BinanceDEX traders and investors. This lent strong support to XRP in the early part of last week, and as a result the XRP/USDT rate bounced back to above the key technical level of resistance of 0.2500, which now operates as a level of support. 

Another factor that powered the growth was the reported news on testing Ripple in the SWIFT system. Ripple’s speed and the low cost of the projects pleased SWIFT, and now XRP has every chance to continue its collaboration with SWIFT. This will be a giant triumph for Ripple, which has already established a partnership with MoneyGram. According to the MoneyGram CEO, the Ripple xRapid promotion will be massive. This means that we should be expecting more Ripple technology success stories in the entire quarter. 

ETH investors are still counting on growth 

Over the past week we have looked at the situation surrounding Ethereum, and there have been no material changes. The buyers are still unable to reach their target mark of 203, but – and this is more important! – the price is holding significantly higher than the level of support of 155-160 we mentioned before. 

The deterrent for the buyers was the fact that the testnet Ropsten forked into two chains after the activation of Istanbul update. Hudson Jameson, the Ethereum Foundation community manager, reported that the hardfork took place earlier than expected. As a result, many miners were unable to complete their software on time. The activation came ahead of schedule because of the unusually fast block confirmations. 

Some developers criticized the upgrade approach and stated their belief that another testnet is now needed. Nevertheless, ETH continues to be relatively stable, and only the drop of the ETH/USDT rate to under 160 will signal buyers’ weakness, thereby increasing the risk of a substantial wave of selloffs.