Crypto Today: Bitcoin extends the decline, no panic selling yet

Here's what you need to know on 

Markets:

BTC/USD is currently trading at $9,759 (+2.0% on a day-to-day basis). The coin has been moving within a short-term bearish trend after a failure to break above $10,200.

The ETH/USD pair is currently trading at $220.0 (+1.7% on a day-to-day basis). The Ethereum retreated from the intraday high of $223.36; now, it is moving within a short-term bearish trend amid low volatility. 

XRP/USD settled at $0.2700 after a dip to $0.2672 on Tuesday. The coin is down 2.3% in recent 24 hours.

Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies, the best of the day are Huobi Pool Token (HPT) $0.0094 (+23.9%),Waves (WAVES) $1.34 (+16.5%) and OKB (OKB) $5.49 (+13.5%), The day's losers are, KickToken (KICK) $0.0005 (-25.8%), Lisk (LSK) $1.96 (-16.42%) and Aion (AION) $0.1240 (-13.92%).

Chart of the day:

BTC/USD, 4-hour chart

Market:

In less than four years, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) gathered 285 000 BTC under management, which is over 1.5% of all Bitcoins in circulation, according to Larry Chermak, researcher from The Block. The fund colledted fees to the tune of $80 million, while the inflows reached $438 million in 2019, which is nearly 700% higher from $64 million in 2017.

Fundstrat's Tom Lee reiterated his bullish Bitcoin forecasts for 2020. He believes the first digital coin will outpace Dow and hit $40,000 by the end of the year. Speaking at CNBC's 'Power Lunch,' he said that technical setup and major global developments including coronavirus outbreak will cause the massive price increase. 

Industry:

Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange announced peer-to-peer (P2P) trading services for the Russian Ruble (RUB). The platform users will be able to buy and sell USDT, BTC, ETH and BNB using RUB with zero fee via mobile app available for iOs and Andriod devices. Binance P2P trading platform was launched in October 2019. Currently, it supports  Chinese Yuan (CNY), Vietnamese Dong (VND) and Russian Ruble (RUB). Also, the company plans to add more digital coins and extend fiat support in 2020 to cater the needs of users from different countries.

“Russia is a vibrant  market for blockchain and crypto advancement. We strive to provide our Russian users with easy fiat-to-crypto access. P2P trading provides an open marketplace and more flexible access for users to trade multiple cryptocurrencies with other users or merchants in the payment methods they prefer,” Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao commented.

The US-based cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex deleted all trading history and cancelled all withdrawal requests for 12 minutes after identifying a bug in the system. The company said that the error had been caught during automatic audit, which placed the site into mantainance mode.

Today, at 17:53 UTC, we introduced a bug that briefly caused trades to be executed erroneously. Our automated balance audits caught the error and placed the site into maintenance mode. We have identified the bug and deployed a fix.

Currently, the exchange operates in an ordinary mode, users are allowed to adjust their orders in accordance with the current prices.

Regulation:

U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel of Manhattan will hear the Securities and Exchange Commission’s crypto enforcement proposal against Telegram on February 19. The SEC insists that the team behind the encrypted messaging app raised nearly 2 billion for the blockchain development  in breach of securities laws. However, Telegram representatives counter that their cryptocurrency tokens are not securities, thus they are outside the SEC's jurisdiction.