Crypto Today: Bearish Monday pressures on Bitcoin and major altcoins

Here's what you need to know on Monday

Markets:

- BTC/USD is currently trading at $8,097 (-1.1% since the beginning of the day). The coin has retreated from the intraday high of $8,193, though the trend is still bullish. 

- The ETH/USD pair is currently trading at $143.4 (2.2% since the beginning of the day). The Ethereum retreated from the intraday high of $146.95; now, it is moving within a short-term bearish trend amid low volatility. 

- XRP/USD settled at $0.2112 after an attempt to move towards $0.2200. The coin is down 1.8% since the beginning of Monday.Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies, the best of the day are DxChain Token (DX) $0.0010 (+18.5%), Synthetix Network Token (SNX) $0.9369 (+16.5%) and TomoChain (TOMO) $0.4865 (+11.7%), The day's losers are, Ren (REN) $0.4320 (-7.1%), LUNA (LUNA) $0.1980 (-5.42%) and Energi (NRG) $1.70 (-5.12%).

Chart of the day:
EOS/USD, 1-hour chart

Market:

- Bitcoin trading volumes more than doubled in just one week, according to the research firm Arcane Research. The company found out that the 7-day average daily trading volume jumped by  126% during the first week of 2020 and hit $1.5 billion traded on January 8 as compared to a miserable $192 million on January 1. This development can be regarded as a bullish signal as it supports the theory of Bitcoin being used as a safe-haven asset.

- Over 40 million Litecoins, or over the half of all coins in circulation have been inactive for over a year now, according to the statistical data, provided by bitinfocharts. Experts see in as a positive long-term signal as it means that investors tend to treat LTC as a store of value rather than a speculative asset.

Industry:

- Aragata update was successfully activated on Ethereum Classic mainnet on January 12. However, only 59% of nodes participated in the update by the time of writing. Agarata is a logical extension of Atlantis update launched in September 2019. It adds Ethereum operations codes in ETC. Commenting on the nodes, that were not upgraded,  Bob Summerwill, Executive Director, ETC Cooperative wrote:

My assumption is that many of these were run by node operators who spun up new nodes but kept their Classic Geth nodes running until after the hard-fork when they will be later decommissioned.

- The founder of TRON Justin Sun announced another super cool secret project taht is going to boost Bittorrent and Tron's ecosystems. However, the community seems to be skeptical as Sun is famous for overhyping his announcements. The details of the new projects are not available yet. TRX is range-bound with bearish bias.

Regulation:

- The Japanese Financial Services Agency intends to limit leverage in cryptocurrency margin trading to twice the deposits made by traders. The new rule is stricter than a limitation introduced by a self-regulatory body,  Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association. The FSA based its decision on past cryptocurrencies price fluctuations and corresponding regulations in Europe and the United States, according to the sources. The cryptocurrency trading platforms may be forced to change their business models as the new rules may hamper speculative trading, which is now represents 80-90% of the transactions via cryptocurrency exchanges.

Quote of the day:

If you give a toddler an orange, they'll eat half now and save half for later, safeguarding it fervently. An economic system built on savings rather than consumption usurps power from govts and corporations back to individuals. Saving is innate. Consuming is learned.

Su Zhu, CEO of Three Arrows Capital