Crypto Today: Bitcoin drifts lower, drags the market down

Here's what you need to know on 

Markets:

BTC/USD is currently trading at $10,255 (+1.43% on a day-to-day basis). The coin has been range-bound with bearish bias during early Asian hours after hitting 2020 high at $10,504 on Thursday.

The ETH/USD pair is currently trading at $265.5 (+1.5% on a day-to-day basis). The Ethereum's coin retreated from the recent high of $277.39; now, it is range-bound with bullish bias amid low volatility. 

XRP/USD settled at $0.3240 after a spike to $0.3388 on Thursday. The coin is mostly unchanged in recent 24 hours.

Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies, the best of the day are THETA (THETA) $0.1681 (+20.3%), Centrality (CENNZ) $0.1014 (+17.4%) and Bytecoin (BCN) $0.00038 (+13.16%), The day's losers are, Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) $0.0493 (-26.5%), ICON (ICX) $0.3863 (-12.42%) and Seele (SEELE) $0.0972 (-9.6%).

Chart of the day:

XRP/USD, 4-hour chart

Market:

XRP/USD flash-clashed on BitMEX amid highly volatile markets. The exchange rate of the third-largest digital asset dropped towards $0.13 on the cryptocurrency derivatives exchange and thus caused massive positions liquidations. Notably, on other exchanges, the coin traded above or around  $0.33. Due to the sharp collapse, many stop-losses didn't trigger, which caused significant losses to many traders, who came to Twitter to express their anger and frustration. BitMEX confirmed the flash-crash but refused to admit the fault of the stop-loss system. It means., that traders that incurred losses due to the collapse will not be refunded. 

Steve Hanke, an economist at Johns Hopkins University joined the chorus of crypto critics. Commenting on PlusToken scam. he said that cryptocurrencies were unsafe and unstable. He also added that it was not real money.

Cryptocurrencies are only good at one thing: enabling scams and theft. Cryptos are unsafe, unreliable, and unstable. These highly-speculative "assets" have a long way to go until they are ready to be called real currencies.

According to MKM Partners chief market technician JC O’Hara, Bitcoin can get to $12,000 in the nearest future. He believes that a sustainable move above $10,000 has brought positive momentum to the market that will push the coin to the next bullish target. 

We broke out of the downward sloping trend channel. We’re breaking above the $10,000 psychological level, and we’re of the opinion that positive momentum will continue to follow positive momentum. So that’s why we think in the short term we could see $12,000 on bitcoin.

Industry:

IOTA's desktop wallet Trinity fell victim to a hack attack. Several users report that their funds have been stolen. Currently, there are six or seven registered cases of funds loss. One user had the wallet installed on Mac OS, others had Windows versions. The team of the project issued a warning for Trinity users:

We are currently investigating a suspicious situation with Trinity, please do not open or use Trinity on Desktop until further notice.

Wells Fargo joined SBI Group and Santander InnoVentures at Series B round of financing launched by a blockchain startup Elliptic. The team raised $40 million during all financing rounds with $5 million coming from one of the US-largest banks. Elliptic was founded in 2013. The project has developed cryptocurrency platform tools to identify and block illicit transactions. The newly raised fund s will help to accelerate the launch of the risk management solution.

Quote of the day:

I've been an observer of crypto twitter for the last six months and I can't untangle who hates whom. Maybe someone can draw a diagram for me.

Jared Dillian, the editor and publisher of The Daily Dirtnap, investment strategist at Mauldin Economics, and the author of "Street Freak".