Cryptocurrency Market News: Bitcoin hunting for treasure above $12,000, Chainlink leaves altcoins in the dust

Here is what you need to know on Tuesday, August 18, 2020.

Markets:

Bitcoin explored the levels above $12,000 for the third time this month. However, unlike the first two price actions, this time Bitcoin extended the price action to highs close to $12,500. A reversal has already ensued with Bitcoin seeking support at $12,230. An intraday high has been formed at $12,400, marking a key barrier ahead of the critical $12,500. At the time of writing, BTC is teetering at $12,268.

Ethereum advanced higher in tandem with Bitcoin even rising above last week’s high at $445 to trade a new yearly high at $447. As discussed earlier, the cryptoasset is seeking support around $430 although all eyes are focused on breaking above the resistance at $440 and $450 respectively.

Ripple also pushed upwards, breaking above the resistance at $0.32. It is trading at $0.3158 at the time of writing amid attempts to build upon the opening value of $0.3157. On the upside, $0.3218 is the intraday traded high as well as the short term resistance target.

As Bitcoin soared to new yearly highs around $12,492 some smaller coins also spiked to record double digit-gains in the last 24 hours. For instance, Tron (12%), Aave (11.94%), NEM (12.70%), Ren (15%), yearn.finance (26.38%), Ocean protocol (17.62%) and Flexacoin (27.689%).

Chart Of The Day: ETH/USD 1-hour

Market:

Just after trading a new all-time high at $20, Chainlink coin-margined perpetual contract having a leverage of up to 75x is set to launch on Binance Futures. The LINK/USD perpetual swap contract will start trading on August 19 at 7.00 a.m. (UTC).

Chainlink has been one of the most-improved cryptoassets in the industry in 2020 even rising to the fifth position by market capitalization. LINK is now bigger than Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin. At the moment, it is trading at $16.91 after suffering rejection at $20. With support from Binance, the cryptocurrency could gain momentum for action towards $30 as discussed earlier.

Industry:

Binance is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanged by reported volume and number of users. Amid Bitcoin surge above $12,000 on Monday, the exchange posted its highest level of system traffic. Moreover, the exchange company’s market cap shot to the highest level in a period of 12 months.

We are seeing ATH in terms of system traffic. Higher than Dec 2017. Should be interesting to see what happens next.

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) August 17, 2020

The CEO, Changpeng Zhao later communicated to followers that:

Very high traffic. Auto-scaling was a little behind. There was a balance syncing issue, fixed. There was also a web traffic hitting limit issue, fixed. Both lasted a few minutes.

Moving on, Robinhood, another cryptocurrency buy and sell platform managed to raise $200 million in its latest funding round. The Series G funding round saw the company bring its total valuation to $11.2 billion. The new investment would be channeled to bettering Robinhood’s “core product and customer experience.” Perhaps the multiple outages experienced this year have necessitated the improvement of the trading app’s customer service.