Cryptocurrency Market News: Bitcoin back at $9,000, are we glued to this pivot until halving?

Here's what you need to know on Wednesday

Markets:

BTC/USD is changing hands at $9030, mostly unchanged both on a day-to-day basis and since the beginning of Wednesday. The coin recovered from the intraday low of $8,922. Now it is trading within the strong short-term bullish bias amid high volatility.

At the time of writing, ETH/USD is changing hands at $207.50. The price tested the low of $202.14 during early Asian hours, but reversed to the upside. The second-largest coin has barely changed since this time on Tuesday. Now ETH is moving within a short-term bullish trend. The volatility is high.

XRP/USD is hovering at $0.2196, while the recovery is completely blocked by $0.2200. A sustainable move above this area is needed for the upside to gain traction. Despite the lockdown, XRP/USD is trading within a bullish trend amid high volatility.

Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies, ReddCoin (RDD) $0.0014 (+43.8%),  DigiByte  (DGB) $0.0250 (+25.2%) and Chiliz (CHZ) $0.0103 (+23.9%)

The day's losers are Hyperion (HYN) $0.4544 (-34.8%), Seele-N (SEELE) $0.0752 (-6.9%), Quant (QNT) $4.8 (-4.88%).

Chart of the day:
BTC/USD, 30-min chart

Market

According to the recent research performed by a German Bitcoin freelance developer known under a pseudonymous name 0xb10c, the average fee paid by bitcoin users spikes for up to an hour around mid-morning New York time due to BitMEX daily broadcasting.

At around 13:00 UTC every day, BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange and derivative trading platform, broadcasts multiple megabytes of large transactions into the Bitcoin network. This affects the transaction fees paid during European afternoons and US business hours, he writes.

As the fees depend on how much congestion is in the network, too many transactions sent at the same time cause a sharp increase. Moreover, miners confirm through those with higher fees in the first place, while transactions with smaller fees will have to wait.

The Twitter-bot of Whale Alert service reported that the money stolen from the Korean cryptocurrency exchange Upbit in November 2019 moved again. Someone transferred 2,000 ETH (415,390 USD) of the stolen to an unknown wallet.

Industry

The cryptocurrency exchange ExtStock with the reported trading volume over $600 million according to CoinMarketCap, is suspected in exit scam as the company does not return user funds. The team of the cryptocurrency project Lisk posted a Tweet where it warned the community against dealing with the platform.

Today, we announced that #LSK is listed on the @extstock  exchange. The #Lisk community informed us that the exchange is currently experiencing major issues by withholding users' funds. For safety reasons, we removed the old tweet and recommend everyone to be very cautious.

A new token JST promoted by the CEO of TRON, Justin Sun, was sold in less than five minutes. JST is a token behind the cryptocurrency lending platform JUST, which runs on TRON blockchain. According to Sun, it took 4 minutes 26 seconds to complete the token sale that was held on LaunchBase of the cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex, also controlled by Justin Sun. Meanwhile, Poloniex hinted on possible JST listing in the nearest future.

The confirmed trading volumes on the cryptocurrency exchanges dropped sharply in April, according to the research performed by Larry Cermak from The Block.

Legitimate volume on cryptocurrency exchanges has seen a steep decline in April, which has historically never been a good sign. Down 28.4% vs. March.

Meanwhile, in March the trading volumes jumped by 22% as compared to February data. The spike was caused by a sharp growth of volatility in mid-March when Bitcoin lost over 50% of its value in a matter of days.