`Crypto Today: Bitcoin dives under $8,000, while XRP attempts a recovery

Here's what you need to know on 

Markets:

BTC/USD is trading below $7,900 during early Asian hours after a failed attempt to settle above $8,000 on Tuesday. BTC has stayed mostly unchanged both on a day-to-day basis and since the beginning of the day.

ETH/USD has settled below $200.00 in Asia. The coin retreated from the intraday high of $203.18. ETH/USD is currently trading within a short-term bearish bias amid expanding short-term volatility.  

XRP/USD recovered above $0.2100 during early Asian hours. XRP/USD has gained nearly 2% on a day-to-day basis. Now it is trading with a short-term bullish bias amid expanding volatility. 

Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies, the best of the day are Contentos (COS) $0.0594 (+394.4%), Blockstack (STX) $0.1519 (+30.8%) and Waves (WAVES) $1.31 (+20.5%). The day's losers are Swipe (SXP) $0.7996 (-7.6%), Augur (REP) $11.76 (-6.5%), DxChain Token (DX) $0.0015 (-6.4%).

Chart of the day:

XRP/USD, 4-hour chart

Market

According to Ari Paul, the CTO of BlockTowerCapital, money-printing campaign launched by the global central banks to fight the economic consequences of coronavirus is the bullish case for Bitcoin and digital currencies as a whole. Speaking in the interview with TD Ameritrade Network, he said: 

I totally agree with Novogratz that the strongest bull case for Bitcoin is what we are seeing right now, which is the entire U.S. Treasury curve below one percent.

Industry

The leading cryptocurrency wallet provider Blockchain.com launched a retail lending program that allows users to borrow fiat money against their cryptocurrency holdings. As the statement in the company's blog says:

Starting today, you can borrow USD against your crypto, directly from your non-custodial Wallet, for the first time ever. Users can now borrow USD Digital stablecoins against their Bitcoin, with support for Ether, Bitcoin Cash, and Stellar coming soon.

The service is available as of March 10.

The five years of research by the Cardano development team has resulted in a new Hydra sharding technology, which can significantly increase the second level scalability due to the so-called “hydra heads”. The news was reported by Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson.

Tests confirmed that each “hydra-head” can process 1000 transactions per second. With 1000 pools using the technology, throughput will reach 1 million transactions.

Hydra technology channels, designed specifically for Cardano's staking pools, are not integrated into the general ledger and process transactions outside the network. Hoskinson added that Hydra was quite "graceful" fit into the system. It is compatible with all versions of Cardano: Shelley, Goguen, Voltaire Cardano.

Robinhood users have been struggling with technical issues and app's outages, while the company has been grappling with financial strains, Bloomberg reports, citing knowledgeable sources. The company received $200 million credit facility from Barclays Plc, Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., amid growing market volatility caused by the spread of the coronavirus. Meanwhile, violent market swings and growing trading volume lead to at least three Robinhood’s trading platform outages that outraged users. However, the company denied the allegations about the financial woes, claiming that the decision to raise financing had nothing to do with the outages.

Our capital position remains strong. We determined it was prudent to draw on our credit line during the week of Feb. 24 in light of market volatility. That capital was returned in full last week.

Regulation

Member of the US House of Representatives Paul Gosar introduced a number of amendments to the Cryptocurrency Bill 2020. Now the document includes a detailed definition of a distributed cryptographic ledger, mentions smart contracts and various consensus algorithms.

Also, digital assets are divided into three categories. Cryptocurrency is defined as an instrument pegged to the US dollar, or “a synthesized derivative on the blockchain”. Cryptocurrency exchange instruments are defined as interchangeable economic goods or services based on the blockchain. Cryptocurrency securities include all debt, equity and derivative blockchain-based tools.

Quote of the day

The point of using a blockchain is to ensure that cheaters never win.

Jameson Lopp, Co-founder & CTO CasaHODL