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Crypto Today: Bitcoin goes wild amid nightmare on the global markets

Here’s what you need to know on 

Markets:

BTC/USD is hovering around $5,000 after a dip below $4,000 during early Asian hours. The first digital coin lost nearly 50% of its value in less than two days amid growing panic on the market. 

ETH/USD dropped below $100.00 in Asia before recovering to $120.50 by the time of writing. The coin has regained 10% from the levels registered at the beginning of the day; however, it is still down 33% on a day-to-day basis.

XRP/USD crashed to $0.1129 during early Asian hours. By press time XRP/USD has recovered to $0.1450.

Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies, Multi-collateral DAI (DAI) $1.04 (+2.9%) is the only coin on a positive territory. The day’s losers are Maker (MKR) $232.91 (-49.7%), IOST (IOST) $0.0021 (-47.5%), Nervos Network (CKB) $0.0031 (-47.0%).

Chart of the day:

BTC/USD, 30-min chart

Market:

Bitcoin’s hash rate crashed below 100 TH/sec on March 11. By the time of writing, the value has recovered to 124.5 TH/sec, which may signal that the price collapse may come to an end. The has rate is directly correlated with the price as miners are forced to switch off their equipment if they cannot pay electricity bills with what they get from mining. According to Jacob Canfield (@JacobCanfield) a lot of miners are still profitable as long as BTC stays above $4,000; however, in some countries like Venezuela, they can withstand even much lower prices.

A prominent economist and Bitcoin critic Peter Schiff added oil to the fire saying that Bitcoin is a sinking ship.

As #Bitcoin crashes below 7K hodlers going down with the ship can no longer take comfort in Bitcoin still being up for the year. As the air continues to come out of this bubble, the faithful will always be able to point to a past date from which the price of Bitcoin is still up.

He also noted that Gold lost only 2.5% of its value, while Bitcoin collapsed by over 25%, which makes it irrelevant as a safe-haven asset.

Sure #gold is down 2.5% today, but #Bitcoin is down 25%, or ten times as much. Is this really digital gold?

Industry

BitMEX, the largest platform for cryptocurrency derivatives and marginal trading, confirmed the issues on the side of the cloud service provider. The issue caused a delay in request processing.

Between 02:16 and 02:40 UTC 13 March 2020 we became aware of a hardware issue with our cloud service provider causing BitMEX requests to be delayed. Normal service resumed at 03:00 UTC. As a reminder, the latest system updates can be found on our status page

Coinbase has launched Bitcoin transaction batching. This feature is supposed to reduce the load on Bitcoin blockchain produced by Coinbase transactions and consequently save users over 50% on network fees. 

Historically, every time a Coinbase customer sent bitcoin, we broadcasted a single on-chain transaction. Starting today, we will be bundling multiple sends into a single transaction — we anticipate that this will reduce our load on the Bitcoin network by more than 50%, and the network fees our customers pay will automatically be reduced by an equivalent amount when sending.

The company also noted that the move is deemed to improve the usability of Bitcoin’s open protocol and help to solve the issues related to the network’s capacity of processing a large amounts of transactions.

Regulation

Mark Carney, the outgoing governor of the Bank of England (BoE) is concerned about the influence of central bank digital currency (CBDC) on the monetary system/ The head of the British regulator warned that CBDC may threaten financial stability and should be handled with care. In a foreword to a BoE discussion paper devoted to CBDC, Carney said:

While CBDC poses a number of opportunities, it could raise significant challenges for maintaining monetary and financial stability … and would need to be very carefully designed if it were to be introduced.

Notably, today is his last day in a  position at the central bank. He leaves for a new role as UN special envoy on climate action and climate finance, while a current head of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), will take his place as a governor of the Bank of England.

Quote of the day

$btc was always a confidence game. All crypto is. And it appears global confidence in just about anything has evaporated. What brings it back to $btc.

Mike Novogratz, the CEO of Galaxy Digital

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