Cryptocurrency News Update: Why Tether mints USDT like there's no tomorrow and what can trigger 1,400% BTC rally

Here's what you need to know on Monday

Markets:

BTC/USD has settled below $9700 amid volatile Asian hours. The first digital coin retreated from the intarday high of $9,891. It has stayed mostly unchanged on a day-to-day basis and lost 1% since the beginning of Tuesday. Now it is trading within the short-term bullish bias amid expanding volatility.

At the time of writing, ETH/USD is changing hands at $243.32, down 1.34% since the beginning of the day. The price stopped within a whisker of psychological $250.00 in Asia and retreated back inside the previous range. Now ETH is moving within a short-term bullish trend. The volatility is low.

XRP/USD is changing hands at $0.2030. The coin dropped to $0.1997 during early Asian hours, but managed to regain the ground due to fresh buying interest below $0.2000.  From the short-term perspective, XRP/USD is trading within a bearish trend amid low volatility.

Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies, Kyber Network  (KNC) $0.8917 (+19.5%), Aave (LEND) $0.0723 (+10.6%), Nervos Network (CKB) $0.0044 (+7.5%). The day's losers are Divi  (DIVI) $0.0409 (-22.38%) HedgeTrade (HEDG) $2.04 (-17.9%), MaidSafeCoin (MAID) $0.1234 (-9.0%).

Chart of the day:

ETH/USD, 30-min chart

Market

Simon Dedic, Blockfyre’s co-founder, predicts that Bitcoin will experience 1,400% price increase and hit  $150,000, while the bull's market while Ethereum and other major altcoins will feature even more impressive rally amid the upcoming bull's market. However, his optimistic forecasts extends only to solid coins.

In 2017, you could have bought literally any alt and it was a good investment. Imo this won’t happen again. However, I still believe that the bull run will return, pumping the few solid alts out there, he wrote on Twitter.

Among the solid coins with bullish perspectives, he mentioned ETH, LINK, VET, BNB and XTZ.

According to Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino, the company was forced to mint 5 billion in the last six months to satisfy a strong demand for dollars from the cryptocurrency exchanges and OTC platforms after the market crashed in mid-March. Speaking on the “On The Brink With Castle Island” podcast, he explained that after a huge price collapse many people were stuck, because they could not move their fiat fast enough to react to the price movements. This situation increased the demand for the stablecoin.

Industry

The largest cryptocurrency data provider CoinMarketCap continued its experiments with ranks. As a result, once the largest trading platforms for cryptocurrency derivatives BitMEX dropped to 175th, while the leading cryptocurrency option platform Deribit landed on179th place. Now BitMEX sits next to little-known platforms BTCBOX and UPEX, while Deribit is a neighbor to Altcoin Trader and Sistemkoin with zero average liquidity.

The ranking is topped by Binance, followed by Huobi Global, Coinbase Pro, Kraken and Bitfinex. The ranks are based on a combination of factors including traffic, liquidity and trading volumes.

Regulation

Chinese law enforcement agencies have frozen assets in the bank accounts of "thousands" of over-the-counter (OTC) cryptocurrency merchants and their customers over the alleged illicit activity and money laundering .

Sun Xiaoxiao, the head of OTC trading platform and a former employee at a Chinese crypto wallet startup Bixin, wrote in a Weibo post that his bank accounts had been blocked. Other users confirmed that his case had not been unique.

He also pointed out that it was the first time when law enforcement authorities resorted to massive bans as usually such punitive measures are targeted at  online fraud, Ponzi schemes and casinos.

Now there are also OTC merchants who had their bank accounts frozen because of questions over the source of the coins they bought. That means, besides ‘dirty money,” there are also ‘dirty coins‘ circulating, he added.

Saudi Arabian Central Bank will use blockchain technology to interact with local banks. According to the official document published by Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA), a part of the liquidity injections to the financial system will be transferred via blockchain channels. This step is another evidence of the Saudi Arabian interest in the innovative technologies in the financial sector. 

SAMA is running a program aimed to increase the share of blockchain-based public and banking services in the country. Thus, the authority launched The Fintech Saudi Initiative and implemented the Regulatory Sandbox for decentralized financial instruments.