Summary:

• Indian ruling party members accused of cryptocurrency fraud

• Bitcoin (BITCOIN on xStation5) test 33-period moving average on H4 interval

• Binance founder says 2018 net profit may reach $1 billion

Over the past 24 hours the major virtual currencies gave back some of its recent gains. The capitalization of the whole market sits a notch above the $260 billion while excluding Bitcoin this figure would stand at $150 billion. An interesting story comes from India as one of the opposition groups accuses ruling party of involvement in a large scale cryptocurrency fraud at the time when the Reserve Bank of India ban on digital assets is going live.

Indian National Congress, the former ruling party of India, accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Indian ruling party, of numerous misconducts concerning virtual currencies in the state of Gujarat. The Congress claims that some top BJP members performed several illegal hawala transactions and even used the domestic police and intelligence agencies to extort and seize cryptocurrencies from citizens. The opposition party claims that the frauds amount to over $760 millions with this figure having possibility to increase to $10 billion. However, it should be noted that this may be just a part of a political play aimed at damaging the ruling party’s reputation and therefore accusations may be fake. Congress politicians stated that the misdoings concerned Bitcoin specifically and this statement makes claims look dubious as the $10 billion figure would suggest that around 10% of the whole Bitcoin market was a subject to alleged misconduct.

After failing to break above the resistance level at $6700 and therefore producing higher high the BITCOIN price pulled back towards the support level at $6500. The most famous digital currency is testing the 33-period moving average on H4 interval (green line) at  that lies just a notch below the earlier mentioned support. In the past the price seemed to respect this technical hurdle therefore we may also see some price action in this area this time. Source: xStation5

While this year is nothing like the previous one for the cryptocurrency market still there is money to be made in this sphere. Bitcoin bulls may be outraged by this statement given the fact that the most famous virtual currency slumped more than 60% since its peak in mid-December but we are not speaking about investors here. We are speaking about cryptocurrency exchanges. Changpeng Zhao, the founder of a Binance exchange, admitted that in the first half of the year the company’s revenue reached around $300 million. Moreover, he continued saying that he expects the full year net profit to range from $500 million to $1 billion. Zhao founded Binance in July last year and developed it to become the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world with a daily turnover of $1.3 billion. In the cryptocurrency “days of glory” when the investment frenzy was driving coins to the all-time highs Binance’s daily trading volumes reached even $11 billion.

RIPPLE did not succeed in breaking above the $0.50 handle and in turn we saw the coin retreat towards $0.46 handle, a level that saw some price action in early April (orange circle on the chart above). The latest candlestick on the H4 interval suggests that the bulls are looming in this area therefore a bounce may be on cards. Source: xStation5

Despite the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets warnings on cryptocurrencies the Flow Traders, the Dutch company that is the biggest ETF and ETN trader in Europe, decided to jump into this market sometime ago. It is the first financial institution in the world to publicly admit it is trading ETNs on cryptocurrencies. The company focuses mainly on notes based on Bitcoin and Ether prices. The Swiss ETN provider confirmed that a significant rise in Flow Traders’ trading volume was observed on its notes in the past months. This is another evidence proving that the “big finance” sees cryptocurrency market as lucrative and is eyeing ways to enter it in secure manner at time when governments around the world are implementing regulations concerning the matter. Having that in mind, we may expect more news of this sort to surface in the upcoming future.

In the past few days LITECOIN trading range was limited by 8- and 21-day moving averages. Yesterday, this digital asset broke below the 8-day moving average (blue line on the chart above) suggesting some more downside may be on cards. Source: xStation5