Crypto market participants pinned many hopes on the past weekend. Some were waiting for a new rally by analogy with the last two jumps, others were waiting for a correction. And it all happened at once. The rapid growth to $4,200 for bitcoin launched an active profit taking, taking away immediately $400. Thus, no matter how crypto-optimists would like to believe in reaching the bottom and reversing the market, we are still faced with the usual speculations. All altcoins sold out after Bitcoin, showing drawdown magnitude of 10-20%, and the mark of 4000 remained a serious resistance.
No matter how strange it may sound to crypto enthusiasts, the best thing that can happen with the crypto market is a moderate dynamic in which all participants can concentrate on the development and implementation of technologies, rather than on prices jumps. Experts calculated that the current phase of the cryptocurrency ice age lasts for 435 days, which is longer than last time, and this is good news for the industry as a whole, although bad for investors who have staked in the period of general excitement at higher price levels.
Presumably, at the end of February, we'll see Ethereum hard fork. The event is very long-awaited, it is difficult to predict what kind of reaction it will cause, however, market participants are unlikely to get something unexpected, and predictability rarely becomes a catalyst for market dynamics.
Quite unexpected was the news that Bitmain releases a new, more energy-efficient chip for Bitcoin mining. Experts believe that this may be due to IPO plans. New ASIC miners production at the moment is a very risky event. Nevertheless, judging by the number of extensions that have appeared for cryptocurrency transfers, payment applications, protocols, and services integrations, during the last year market participants built the infrastructure for digital assets, making it possible to speculate that crypto market players still want to become an alternative to the banking system.
Alexander Kuptsikevich, the FxPro analyst