Optimism in the cryptocurrency market

Even though most coins with a capitalization of more than $1B do not show growth, and over the last seven days they have been declining, several experts remain optimistic. It is worth noting that over the past seven trading days, only Ethereum Classic (ETC) has shown strong growth (+ 26.5%). There may be several reasons for the strong growth of ETC. There are the three main drivers that support ETC:

• Atlantis Hard fork. The Ethereum Classic network update, dubbed Atlantis Fork, is scheduled for next month. It is expected that the branching of the network will occur on September 13, after the participants and developers agreed on the block number - 8’772’000. Atlantis Hard Fork is meant to enhance community security.

• Last week, the London token investment group North Block Capital joined the Studio Program which is the program for blockchain developer organization Ethereum Classic Labs (ETC Labs). ETC Labs shared this news on the official blog on August 22. It is reported that the companies will develop various comprehensive initiatives to sell tokens for customers and partners of North Block Capital.

• Expansion to the Asian markets. Muneeb Ali, the CEO and co-founder of  Blockstack PBC recently commented on the attractiveness of entering the Asian market, saying that “Asian countries may have the most significant penetration for both cryptocurrency users and developers.”

Head of Bank of England stands for cryptocurrencies

Mark Carney, the current governor of the Bank of England, addressing the FED, came up with a radical proposal on the feasibility of creating an alternative to the US dollar, such as Libra.

“The combination of heightened economic policy uncertainty, outright protectionism, and concerns that further, negative shocks could not be adequately offset because of limited policy space is exacerbating the disinflationary bias in the global economy,” said Carney. “What then must be done?”

These comments did not bring significant optimism to the cryptocurrency market. However, they are an excellent signal in the long term Carney emphasized that a dollar with reserve currency status should be replaced by a digital payment medium, created by analogy with Facebook’s Libra. According to the banker, this is much better than “letting another currency, such as the yuan, replace the American one.”

Libra under very close scrutiny

The U.S. House of Representatives delegation visited Switzerland, where they met with local regulators to share views about  Libra. After the statements of Mark Carney, US lawmakers will closely monitor the development of the Libra project from Facebook and possibly exert pressure. It is a negative factor not only for Libra but also for the cryptocurrency market in general. A lot will depend on the real actions of the United States aimed at putting the limitations on Libra.

Optimism of cryptographer and Bit Gold creator Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo is optimistic about long-term BTC charts, including volatility and market capitalization.

“The long-term chart reflects the superior deep safety, global seamlessness, and monetary soundness of bitcoin.”

It is not a forecast of an analyst or a crypto enthusiast, but a mathematical calculation of realized capitalization. This method was developed by Nick Carter, the co-founder of Coinmetrics analytics service. It is based on the aggregation of UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output), taking into account the BTC price at the last activity of the coins. At the same time, the indicator does not consider bitcoins, which for a long time, lie motionless and are probably lost forever.

Binance announced the possibility of passive income

Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of the largest Bitcoin exchange Binance, published a tweet about the possibility of passive cryptocurrency income.

After some time, there was information on changes and additional features for users of the exchange on Binance.com. The first paragraph indicates a new opportunity for profit from free crypto assets.

  “Binance users will be able to grow their funds by earning interest income for lending out their holdings over a specific period of time.”