Security Token Exchange

After breaking above $30,000, the largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, is keeping around this key level for now. With 17.7% gains in the past week, BTC is currently trading at $30,090. The price started lagging as the trading volume recorded a decrease of 44.50% from a day ago to now at $16.3 billion.

Meanwhile, Ether has fallen under $1,900 and is now trading at $1,879. The total market cap is currently standing at $1.21 trillion.

This uptrend has ETH’s year-to-date (YTD) gains now standing at 56.48%, much lower than the 80.88% gains recorded by Bitcoin in 2023 so far. Additionally, the price ratio between Ether BTC has sunk to a two-month low as all the attention from the traditional finance giants has shifted to the crypto king.

As of writing, ETHBTC is at 0.06282, down 7.77% in the past month and by 13.10% YTD, according to data from TradingView. This reflects Bitcoin’s far bigger gains this month at 10% versus ETH’s 1% increase. Recently, ETH/BTC ratio hit the 2023 low at 0.0615 though up from the 0.05 to 0.055 range that was last seen in the summer of 2022.

As prices went green, the Crypto Fear & Greed Index turned to ‘Greed,” having a reading of 65. Just last week, the sentiments were “Neutral.”

The latest gains, which saw bitcoin reaching above $30k for the first time since April of 2023 this year, have been driven by a number of traditional finance (TradFi) players pushing further into crypto.

The likes of BlackRock, Invesco, and WisdomTree have filed for spot Bitcoin ETF applications. Meanwhile, Fidelity is rumored to be considering either buying Grayscale or filing for its own spot Bitcoin ETF as well. These developments show that TradFi players aren’t deterred by a regulatory crackdown from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against crypto trading platforms.

Market participants believe the entry of the biggest investment firms in crypto can completely restructure the space in the near future as it will allow more investors to access crypto investments with much lower risks. And even if just a small percentage of clients from these institutions show interest in spot Bitcoin ETF, it will be enough to move the price north.

In addition, another banking giant Deutsche Bank announced that it had applied for a digital asset custody license, BaFin, in Germany. Deutsche Bank’s digital asset custody platform will be launched in stages and will eventually allow users to buy and sell crypto through prime brokers and even provide services such as taxation, lending, staking, voting, fund administration, and more.

Besides being the center of institutions’ attention, BTC is likely to have also benefited from its omission from the tokens listed in SEC’s lawsuit against exchanges Binance and Coinbase as securities. In addition to this, Bitcoin has its biggest narrative upcoming halving next year in April, which could also be bolstering Bitcoin’s position.

BCH Rallies with New Listing on Legacy-backed Exchange

Another big news this week came in the form of the launch of the EDX cryptocurrency exchange. The new crypto trading platform is backed by major financial players, including Citadel Securities, Charles Schwab, and Fidelity Digital Assets.

“I am proud to announce that EDX Markets (EDX) has successfully launched our digital asset market and completed an investment round with new equity partners,” announced EDX Markets CEO Jamil Nazarali. “EDX’s official launch allows our outstanding team to bring to crypto the same values and standards of competition, transparency, fairness, and safety that investors in traditional assets expect and enjoy.”

After nine months of building out its technology, EDX Markets (EDX) is finally live. The plans for the creation of the new crypto exchange were first made in Sept. with investments from major TradFi firms like Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, Citadel, Fidelity, and Schwab. The launch of its digital asset market came with a new round of capital, including investments from GTS, DV Crypto, and Miami International Holdings.

Unlike other crypto exchanges, EDX Markets won’t have custody of customers’ digital assets. Instead, users will have to go through financial intermediaries to buy and sell crypto, much like how trades are executed on the NYSE or the Nasdaq.

According to Nazarali, regulators like this different approach as they believe it’s important that there’s a separation between the exchange function and the broker-dealer function. Later this year, the company will be launching EDX Clearing to settle trades matched on EDX Markets.

Back in April, in an interview, Nazarali had said that “down the line,” they will also consider an international expansion, but right now, their focus is “to solve a problem in the marketplace in the U.S.”

Right at its launch, the platform will be offering trading for four crypto assets in the US, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and Bitcoin Cash (BHC).

The exchange is offering limited tokens due to the unclear regulatory landscape in the US, and “regulators really like that we don’t take that risk,” said Nazarali. All of these crypto assets have recorded close to double-digit gains since Tuesday.

Much like Bitcoin, Litecoin is also awaiting its halving, but unlike the largest cryptocurrency, Litecoin’s big event is less than two months away. Moreover, LTC’s 30-day correlation with Bitcoin is 0.79, implying higher volatility and an increase in price if BTC experiences a rally.

This development also has Bitcoin Cash surging to become one of the top performers in terms of 7-day gains of 35.5%. With these gains, the majority of the wallets holding BCH are now profitable.

The Bitcoin spin-off has been struggling to find a market since launching in 2017. But EDX Markets’ announcement has it rejoicing. The $2.8 billion market cap cryptocurrency is up 9.8% against USD and is now exchanging hands at $143.69. The altcoin is also up 9.3% against Bitcoin, at 0.004775 BTC.

Despite this jump in value that sent BCH to a 16-week high, the trading volume of Bitcoin Cash dropped 36.8% from one day ago to $294.7 million, signaling a recent fall in market activity. Meanwhile, open interest (OI) on BCH derivatives has also jumped 10.66% to $144.4 million, as per CoinGlass. This jump in OI shows new money has entered the market.

The latest gains in BCH price have it turning green in several time frames. The altcoin is up 29.4% in the last fortnight and 27.4% in the past 30 days. However, the token is also down a whopping 96.69% since hitting its all-time high (ATH) at $4,355 in Dec. 2017. BCH hit its all-time low at $76.93 in Dec. 2018 and is only up 83.15% since then.

In 2023, much like the broad crypto market, BCH went from $96.50 to about $145 in Feb, only to drop back down to $110 the next month. Over the next month, BCH’s price surged past $135 as several U.S. banks collapsed but couldn’t recapture previous highs. Ever since then, BCH has been on a downtrend. On June 10, as the crypto market took a hit following the SEC’s crackdown on crypto exchanges, BCH also crashed under $100.

But the crypto asset is now seeing renewed interest, and in less than 48 hours this week, the price of BCH increased by 38%, edging just above the previous $140 resistance level. This has been on the back of a series of positive news, but most importantly, for being one of the four cryptos to be allowed to trade on legacy-backed exchange EDX Markets.

Being supported by top Wall Street participants, this crypto exchange could attract more institutional investors and drive mainstream crypto adoption.

Click here to learn all about investing in Bitcoin Cash (BCH). 

Bitcoin Cash: A “peer-to-peer electronic cash system”

BCH is the native cryptocurrency of Bitcoin Cash, which is a spinoff of the original Bitcoin blockchain. It is designed to be cheaper, faster, and more scalable to use as an electronic cash system than Bitcoin.

The Bitcoin hard fork advocates for a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system.” The core value proposition of the network is cheap peer-to-peer transactions and is dedicated to increasing block sizes and on-chain transaction throughput to achieve this goal.

Bitcoin was created in 2009 by pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto and had been operating smoothly for several years when a number of developers working on the protocol felt the project was deviating from its vision of a cheap, decentralized payment system.

The conflict was due to Bitcoin’s scalability issue. Developer Pieter Wiulle proposed segregated witness (SegWit), which increases the capacity of Bitcoin blocks without changing their size limit but altering how the transaction data is stored, to solve this issue. But Bitcoin developer Amaury Séchet had different views and wanted to keep scaling on-chain. So, Séchet, along with Roger Ver, Craig Wright, Bitmain, and others, left the Bitcoin network and created Bitcoin Cash.

This internal conflict reached its peak during the bull market of 2017, and the Bitcoin blockchain split into two, with BCH officially launching in August 2017. BCH tokens were distributed to each BTC holder at a ratio of 1:1. For each BTC one had, the holder received one BCH token for that.

BCH kept the original codebase but without the SegWit upgrade and increased the maximum block size to 8MB, which was then again increased to 32 MB.

Because Bitcoin Cash shared the same blockchain as Bitcoin, they had similar characteristics, such as the total supply of BCH is capped at 21 million. Also, BCH uses proof-of-work (PoW) consensus, where miners compete against each other using specialized computer equipment to be the first to discover new blocks. It uses the same SHA-256 hashing algorithm as Bitcoin as well. However, compared to Bitcoin’s limited 1 MB block size, which can handle about 2,000 transactions per block, BCH can support 25,000 transactions per block.

While BCH offers faster and cheaper transactions, it is considered more centralized and has failed to gain any significant adoption. BCH is the 24th largest cryptocurrency which, unlike Bitcoin, didn’t manage to make a new ATH during the 2021 bull market. The highest BCH hit at the time was $1,643, nowhere near its $4,355 peak.

Over the years, Bitcoin has been forked many times, but Bitcoin Cash (BCH) remains the most prominent and successful fork ever. But it has been struggling to attract attention and gain traction. The latest gains may not last either, and we could see BCH’s price continue to bleed.

Click here to learn how to buy Bitcoin Cash (BCH) in just four steps.