Cryptocurrency Market News: Bitcoin in tactical retreat to $9,600 before another jump to $10,000

Here's what you need to know on Friday

Markets:

BTC/USD is changing hands above $9,600. The price went as high as $9,944 on Thursday, but the psychological $10,000 remained untouched. The first digital coin recovered from the intraday low of $9,236, however, the short-term trend remains bearish amid low volatility. The next critical support is created by $9,000. 

ETH/USD struggles to stay above $200.00. The second-largest coin touched the intraday low of $197.10 before recovering to $201.30 by press time.  The price has decreased by 1% since the beginning of the day and stayed unchanged on a day-to-day basis. Now ETH is moving within a short-term bearish trend. The volatility is low.

XRP/USD is hovering marginally above $0.2000 after a short-lived move to the intraday low of $0.1970. While a sustainable move outside the range is a positive development, we still need to see a follow-through for the momentum to gain traction. XRP/USD is trading within a bearish trend amid shrinking volatility.

Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies, OmiseGO (OMG) $1.03 (+35.5%), Zilliqa (ZIL) $0.0104 (+17.9%)

 The day's losers are Crypterium (CRPT) $0.4699 (-12.7%), ABBC Coin (ABBC) $0.1438 (-10.2%) Bytecoin (BCN) $0.00025 (-9.2%), IOTA (IOT) $0.2082 (+9.5%)

Chart of the day:
BTC/USD, daily chart

Bitcoin per $476,000 is not science fiction, at least in the long run, according to the CEO and founder at Real Vision and a well-known trader, Raoul Pal. He joined the club of cryptocurrency experts, who believe that Bitcoin has strong growth potential and eventually will cost $300,000-$500,000. Thus, Morgan Creek Digital’s Mark Yusko and a prominent investor Max Keiser aired similar forecasts.  

Industry

Visa has filed a patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for creating digital currency on a blockchain. The application was filed in November 2018, but published only on May 14, 2020. According to the document, Visa International Service Association and inventors Simon J. Hurry and Alexander Pierre wanted to receive a patent for a blockchain-based digital currency controlled by a central entity computer.

The new coin may be based on Ethereum network for the proposed coin that is supposed to be backed by the US Dollar. The process of maintaining the value of the stablecoin is described as follows:

...every time a dollar worth of digital fiat currency is generated, the central entity ensures that a corresponding physical dollar bill is removed from circulation, in order to regulate the value of the digital fiat currency.

According to the data provided by the research company Elliptic, the share of Bitcoin transactions related to illegal activity has been less than 1% of the total amount of operations with the digital currency. The experts noticed that Bitcoin has become less popular in criminal circles. Speaking in the interview with The Block, Tom Robinson, co-founder and chief scientist of Elliptic, said:

There is a clear downward trend. I think this is due to the introduction of anti-money laundering (AML) regulations, the work of law enforcement, and the AML efforts of crypto exchanges and other businesses - as well as speculation emerging as the dominant use of crypto.

Regulation

According to Pantera Capital Founder Dr. Steven Waterhouse, the US government won’t allow private companies to challenge the status of the US Dollar. He believes that the government sees private cryptocurrencies with hundreds of millions of users as a threat to the dollar. Speaking in the interview, recorded prior to Pavel Durov’s announcement, he said

The idea that some random startups are going to build their own stablecoins, perhaps with hundreds of millions of installs of a messenger client, whether it's Facebook or Telegram or someone else, potentially challenge the sort of central bank digital currency or existing central bank currencies? [...] That's got to be triggering for regulators. So I think that's why we've seen such a strong reaction to both Facebook Libra and also Telegram.