Crypto Today: Bitcoin left without Santa rally, unchanged from pre-Christmas time

Here's what you need to know on Friday

Markets: 

• The BTC/USD is currently trading at $7,184 (unchanged on a day-to-day basis). The coin attempted a recovery above $7,200 but failed to hold the ground.
• The ETH/USD pair is currently trading at $125.13 (unchanged on a day-to-day basis). The Ethereum continued the decline after a failure to settle above critical $130.00
• XRP/USD slipped below $0.19. At the time of writing, the coin is trading at $0.1883 amid growing bearish pressure.
• Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies, the best of the day are LUNA (LUNA) $0.4395 (+28.5%), Decentraland (MANA) $0.0348 (+12.5%) and Ethereum Classic (ETC) $4.51 (+9.7%). The day's losers are Aidos Silverway (SLV) $0.4945 (-20.5%), TomoChain (TOMO) $0.5792 (-16.3%), Centrality (CENNZ) $0.0971 (-8.4%).

Chart of the day:
ETC/USD, 4-hour chart

• Mark Cuban, an American billionaire and an owner of the National Basketball Association (NBA)'s Dallas Mavericks, came up with a new portion of critical comments about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a whole. He said that Bitcoin was useless, unlike gold, that had practical use cases. He believes that Bitcoin's ecosystem is unsustainable as it depends on miners who can abandon it at a moment's notice. 
• A Twitter-based service Whale Alert registered a large transaction with NEO. On December 25, someone transferred 200 000 NEO from developers' account to an unknown wallet. The purpose of the transaction remains unknown. Notably, the receiving wallet is relatively new. It was created on December 10, 2019, and now contains 221,000 NEO.

Industry: 

• The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, proposed a solution that would allow abandoning the chain based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) speed up the transition to Ethereum 2.0 and Proof-of-Stake (PoS). He believes that the ETH1 system might exist as a zero shard of ETH2. Validators from ETH1 will be registered as friendly ones. They will support the full ETH1 node in addition to ETH2 node. Meanwhile, full ETH1 node will download all blocks of zero shard and thus keep the system up-to-date. The proposed solution would not affect the agreed procedure of transition from ETH1 to ETH2; however, the developers will have to build stateless client software for ETH1 protocol.
• One of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance, announced support for new trading pair with Turkish lira (TRY) and the Russian ruble (RUB). Also, the exchange added order book trading for all trading pairs with TRY. Previously, they were available only as one-click buys or sells.

Regulation:

• The Head of the Central Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina, said that the regulator had been testing stablecoins in the regulatory sandbox. The governor also confirmed that the central bank was exploring the idea of the central bank's digital coin; however, before the bank launches this project, it is vital to understand its pitfalls and benefits for the end-users.
• North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) issued a warning about risks related to cryptocurrency investments. The regulator released a report on top-five fraudulent schemes that are likely to become popular in 2020. The research is based on investor complaints, ongoing investigations, as well as current enforcement trends. NASAA's list includes crypto investments along with Ponzi schemes, scams with promissory notes and real estate, and social media investment schemes.

Quote of the day: