Summary:

• Scandinavian Nordea bank announces a ban for its employees to invest and trade Bitcoin (BITCOIN on xStation5)
• Largest Australian gold refiner plans to issue gold-backed cryptocurrency
• South Korea finally releases official guidelines for digital currency exchanges and banks

Bitcoin has been moving up over the course of the recent hours however sellers seem to still keep control on the market. From a technical point of view one may notice that the price has been moving of late within an ascending triangle pattern but bulls have already come to an end therefore a possible pullback cannot be precluded at this stage. What’s more, the price has also faced a resistance from a descending trend line which could also play a considerable role in the nearest future. 

Before we take a closer look at charts let’s mention the remarkably curious story from Scandinavia where Nordea Bank decided to follow a move taken by JP Morgan last year. Namely the bank announced earlier this week that it had banned its all employees from trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in a bid to protect them from the risk of unknowingly getting involved in any ethical or illegal activity. Notice that the ban concerned initially only those employees who handle the most affluent customers, however the measure was extended to embrace all 31,500 employees. It’s important to know that the newly adopted ban will not affect those who have already invested in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has run into a resistance in form of an upper boundary of a triangle formation along with a trend line. A possible retreat can be expected once the price breaks below a lower limit of the mentioned pattern. Source: xStation5

Largest Australian gold refiner plans to issue gold-backed cryptocurrency

The Perth Mint, also known as the major Australian precious metals refinery, has informed that it’s developing its own gold-backed virtual currency in order to… lure consumers back to investing in gold. The idea emerged when the company realized how many gold investors flew out and instead turned into new alternative investments – cryptocurrencies. CEO of the group stated that its new cryptocurrency “will have all the benefits of something that is on a distributed ledger that settles very, very quickly, that is easy to trade, but is actually backed by precious metals, so there is actually something behind it, something backing it.”

South Korea finally releases its guidelines for cryptocurrency exchanges

Even as we already mentioned some measures announced by the South Korean watchdog the government also decided to publish its anti money-laundering (AML) guidelines for banks which provide services to cryptocurrency exchanges. Let us recall that South Korea adopted earlier the new real-name system aimed at ending anonymous trading of digital currencies. Notice that the introduction of AML came after the government’s probe revealed that some cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea “collected funds from users through general corporate accounts opened at banks”.