Cryptocurrency Market News: Bitcoin and major altcoins live through a Bloody Monday.

Here's what you need to know on Monday

Markets:

BTC/USD is changing hands at $8660, having recovered from the intraday low of $8,535. The first digital coin has lost 4% in the recent 24 hours and 3.6% since the beginning of Monday. Now it is trading within the strong short-term bearish bias amid expanding high.

At the time of writing, ETH/USD is changing hands at $201.00. The price tested area above $210.00 during early Asian hours but reversed sharply to the downside amid increased bearish sentiments. The second-largest coin lost over 6% since this time on Sunday. Now ETH is moving within a short-term bearish trend. The volatility is high.

XRP/USD is hovering at $0.2120. The coin has recovered from Monday’s low $0.2075 and lost nearly 4% since the start of the day.  From the short-term perspective, XRP/USD is trading within a bearish trend amid high volatility.

Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies, Holo (HOT) $0.0005 (+25.8%), Zilliqa (ZIL) $0.0071 (+16.6%), Hive (Hive) $0.3831 (+10.2%).

The day's losers are Streamr DATAcoin (DATA) $0.0629 (-15.2%), Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) $0.0372 (-10.6%), Siacoin (SC) $0.0019 (-10.3%)

Chart of the day:
BTC/USD, daily chart

Market

Bitcoin retreated from $9,000 once again amid growing anti-risk sentiments caused by increased tension between the US and China. Traders are anxious that the trade war between the two super-powers may be renewed and prefer to stick to short-term trading. Mike Pompeo, U.S. secretary of state, claimed that the Chinese government concealed the potential impact of Covid-19 with the rest of the world. 

We can confirm that the Chinese Communist Party did all that it could to make sure that the world didn’t learn in a timely fashion about what was taking place, he said on Sunday.

While Bitcoin’s correlation to the S&P 500’s movements has weakened recently, it is still vulnerable to the downside risks amid a global flight to safety.

Industry

Bitcoin’s hash rate hit a new all-time record ahead of the halving. According to the data, provided by the research company Glassnode, the hash rate of the first digital coin surpassed 140 EH/s on May 3, which is the highest level on record. Notably, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty will be adjusted in one day, however, this even is unlikely to change the situation as miners are finding blocks in less than ten minutes.

In this difficulty era (ending in 2 days) miners are generating one block in exactly 10 minutes on average. This means diff adjustment will not change difficulty in two days (if it holds the same avg). (@digitalikNet)

Bitfinex and Tether filed a lawsuit against SunTrust bank in Georgia and Bank of Colorado in Colorado, requesting to return $800 million of customer funds frozen on the accounts of  Crypto Capital that served as a payment processor for the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. 

As we have said before, Bitfinex is the victim of a fraud and is asserting its rights to funds taken by Crypto Capital through legal measures initiated in various countries, he said through a spokesperson.

Regulation

The District Court of New Jersey dismissed the class-action lawsuit against the mining company Riot Blockchain. The shareholders of the company accused it of manipulating its equity prices. This Colorado-based company was previously known as Bioptix, Inc. It was engaged mainly in biotechnologies. However, in 2017 it changed the name to Riot Blockchain, Inc. And pivoted to distributed ledger technologies and Bitcoin mining. 

The shares of the company skyrocketed and then dropped sharply. Angered investors filed three lawsuits against the company stating that it provided false information to conceal the lack of experience in the cryptocurrency area and manipulated its share prices.

Iran licensed Turkey-based company iMiner for operating 6000 Bitcoin mining rigs in the province of Semnan. The capacity of the facility is expected to amount to 96,000 Tera hashes per second (TH/s), approximately 16 TH/s per rig on average. Notably, the Iranian government classified cryptocurrency mining as industrial activities and issued over 1,000 mining licenses both for local and foreign companies.