Bitcoin and Ether Market Update: January 07, 2019

Bitcoin dropped below $4,000 on January 3, 2018, losing approximately three percent of its value, but still managed to avoid further loses and closed the workweek at $3,956 on January 4. Trading volumes for the BTC-USD pair were stable above $3 billion.

BTC-USD

NASDAQ-powered Estonian digital trading platform DX Exchange will begin offering tokenized securities on its platform starting January 7.  The European Union-regulated cryptocurrency exchange will be the first to enable investors to trade in companies including Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., and Tesla Inc. outside of the U.S. even when the stock markets are closed. These will be the first securities to be tokenized and traded as ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.

The tokens will be backed 1:1 by real stocks issued by MPS MarketPlace Securities, an exclusive agreement with DX.Exchange, to provide the service.

The second biggest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of trading volume Binance recently announced its own token launch platform called “Binance Launchpad.” As reported in the press release, the Launchpad will help “blockchain projects raise funds and increase their reach across the crypto ecosystem.”

The first two tokens to be offered on the Binance Launchpad are for BitTorrent and Fetch.AI. The first is a TRON-affiliated blockchain project for peer-to-peer file sharing (in July 2018, TRON acquired the peer-to-peer file sharing giant BitTorrent for $126 million). The BTT token will allow BitTorrent peers to incentivize activities that lead to better file sharing, like using faster networks and enabling longer seeding periods.

As for Fetch.AI, it is an artificial intelligence-driven network, where the economic activity is performed by Autonomous Economic Agents (AEAs) – digital entities that can transact without needing human intervention and can represent themselves, devices, services, or individuals.

The biggest cryptocurrency could not find its direction during the trading day on January 5 and continued hovering in the $3,900 to $3,954 area, but successfully broke the $4,000 line on January 6. The sudden spike resulted in a 6.8 percent price increase as BTC closed the session at $4,168 – above $4k for the first time since December 25.

ETH-USD

Ethereum continued to be one of the best-performing currencies in the Top 100. The ETH-USD pair successfully defended the $150 level despite dropping 4.4 percent on January 3. It erased losses on the next day, January 4 and closed the day at $158.

In upcoming news, crypto exchanges Binance, Huobi, and OKEx announced that they would support the Ethereum Constantinople hard fork which is estimated to happen between January 14 and 18. The platforms will handle all technical requirements for upgrading nodes and keeping the Ethereum blockchain up-to-date.

As previously reported, the Constantinople hard fork is an update for an increase in the network’s efficiency. It will also reduce block rewards and make changes to the consensus mechanism to make it more resistant to ASIC miners

The second biggest cryptocurrency in terms on market cap, could not break above $160 and made no significant price movements on January 5. On January 6, however, it finally managed to cross the $160 mark and close at this price, previously touching $165 during intraday.

According to a Medium article, one of the top gaming dApps on Ethereum, EtherGoo, has now moved over to Tron network. The first competitive idle game using the blockchain will be using a new name, TronGoo, and will be developed by the Tron Shrimp team, previously veterans in the ETH development scene.