Cryptocurrency Market News: The majors have struggled while some altcoins outperform & much more

The majors struggle as some of the altcoins shine.

Bitcoin struggles to find any momentum on Friday as it languishes under the 10K zone unable to mount an attack on the psychological zone, for now. On the technical front, the price is still in an uptrend but the wave high of 10428.00 will need to be broken for the trend to continue. The indicators are slightly mixed, the Relative Strength Index is making lower high waves while the price makes higher highs. This is called bearish divergence and can indicate that the bulls are running out of steam. The MACD is turning positive as the histogram breaks into the green and the signal lines are still above the mid-zone. 

Some of the altcoins, however, are performing well. WAX is trading at $0.0755 at the time of writing and it’s up 3% today but more than 70% in the last two days. In fact, the digital asset has been in a robust daily uptrend since April 11 and its price has increased more than 218% going from a low of $0.0237 to a peak today at $0.073. The recent bull run is not a coincidence and is accompanied by a significant surge in trading volume. WAX/USD was barely seeing $1 million in volume per day back in April. Now, the digital asset enjoys more than $50 million across all exchanges.

EOS is in bull market territory and a break of the 2.90 resistance zone will confirm the trend. The market has been making higher highs and higher lows since May and the trend looks set to continue. If the aforementioned level breaks then the psychological 3.00 level and 3.12 high on the chart could be next. The signs are good as the price is trading above both the 55 and 200 moving averages and this is traditionally a bullish sign. Looking closer at the technical indicators, the Relative Strength Index looks to be heading to the overbought area but still has some space to move to the upside. The MACD is also looking good as the histogram just moved over the mid-line into the green. The signal lines are also over the zero level which is also a bullish sign. 

Crypto derivatives volume just hit a new record high

Crypto derivatives monthly volume hit a new all-time high of USD 602 billion in May. Crypto derivatives monthly volume increased by one-third in May to hit a new all-time high of USD 602 billion, according to UK-based data aggregator CryptoCompare. The new record is only just a shade past the previous one of USD 600 billion, registered in March. However, derivatives are becoming ever more popular and now account for 32% of the crypto market — up from 27% in April. In percentage terms, the monthly volume increase in May for derivatives was six times larger than the increase in spot volumes, which was up 5% to USD 1.27 trillion.

Huobi, OKEx and Binance accounted for about 80% of May's derivatives volume combined. In percentage terms, CME saw the largest monthly increase of 59%, though its USD 7.2 billion in volume was dwarfed by market leader Huobi — posting a 29% monthly gain in volume with USD 176B.

IOTA upgrades Hornet node software

IOTA has announced a major upgrade to its Hornet node software, which is the first performance upgrade in IOTA 1.5. the first in a series of planned protocol upgrades. According to the developers, the new version will lead to an increase in adoption, improve decentralization and enhance network performance for IOTA stakeholders.

Hornet consumes 10 times less memory under normal operation, which means that developers do not need to purchase costly equipment and can start running a node on the network in a matter of minutes. 

It seems traders are expecting big things from ETH ahead of the Ethereum 2.0 launch

According to data from Etherscan, the hash rate in Ethereum has been steadily increasing ahead of the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade. 

The chart shows the hash rate has increased by nearly 30% since the start of 2020 to the current levels of 187,369 GH/s suggesting that miners are becoming more involved.

It has been said the rising hash rate means a more secure network and a lower chance of a 51% attack. https://www.crypto51.app/ who calculate the potential costs of running such attacks on the various blockchain networks estimates that the necessary amount to jeopardize Ethereum is about USD  140K per hour. This makes it now in second place to BTC which would need around USD 430K per hour which has fallen since the halving.

Although this increase it great it is still some way off the all-time highs seen on August 9th 2018, which was just under 300K GH/s. The precise date of the Ethreum 2.0 upgrade is still unknown but it is said to be at some point this year.