Moderate Optimism in the Cryptocurrency Market May Continue

 According to the data from CoinMarketCap, over the past week the total cryptocurrency market capitalization grew to $226B. In the meantime, the total BTC capitalization increased to $150.2B, although the foundational cryptocurrency keeps losing its market share as the altcoins are aggressively marching ahead.

At the head of the last week’s growth trend was Binance token (BNB), which gained more than 18.5% while BTC only gained less than 5% in the same time period.

Vitalik Buterin explained how the transition to Ethereum 2.0 will be implemented 

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin tried to dispel the public’s doubts about the long-term development of his platform by shedding light on some of the details of the upcoming transition from the Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm and the resulting move to Ethereum 2.0. 

This issue was one of the hottest topics at Devcon5, a conference which is now taking place in Osaka, Japan, but no clear answers have been forthcoming. Moreover, Vitalik Buterin and another Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin finally admitted that they realized from the very start that there will be problems with scaling up their network. 

Vitalik Buterin claims that the transition to Ethereum 2.0 will take six hours but the actual implementation may take up to two years. 

“The eth1 chain technically continues but it is valueless; eventually it will die off when the difficulty ice age hits,” he wrote.

TON is on edge

The United States Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed “emergency action and obtained temporary restraining order” against two offshore entities involved in the Telegram Open Network (TON) token sale. 

“Our emergency action today is intended to prevent Telegram from flooding the U.S. markets with digital tokens that we allege were unlawfully sold,” said Stephanie Avakian, Co-Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. “We allege that the defendants have failed to provide investors with information regarding Grams and Telegram’s business operations, financial condition, risk factors, and management that the securities laws require.” 

This is certainly not good news for the cryptocurrency market overall, but since most of the market players were aware of the SEC’s position, the response to the announcement was fairly mild.

Katherine Wu, an attorney specializing in cryptocurrency, said that the SEC’s order is not final and whether or not its demands will be satisfied will depend on what the court will decide. 

BTC may resume its growth to $9,300

Getting back to the foundational cryptocurrency, it is important to note that over the past few days the landscape changed dramatically. After BTC rate crashed to $7,800, the sellers’ activity noticeably slowed down, and as a result the rate went into a flat which signaled not so much BTC’s weakness but rather the general market uncertainty. 

While the technical indicator MACD points towards the buyers’ strength, the histogram columns on the daily graph returned to above the zero mark, thereby cancelling this bearish scenario we discussed early last week. Nevertheless, only the breach of the resistance level of $8,800 will allow the market participants to expect the continuation of the upwards drive and, as a result, the replacement of the bearish mood to bullish in the mid-term perspective.