- In the past few days, Bitcoin has seen a strong rally up to $4200 and a subsequent fall that bottomed out in the $3700s
- The upcoming Constantinople fork of Ethereum may be one cause of the turbulence
For two weeks in a row now, bitcoin has rallied after the long bear market and in less than 24 hours it shot past $4,000 per Bitcoin and scraped up against $4,200. This gave fresh hope to crypto investors who have long-suffered due to the bear market.
Good Things to Come for Bitcoin
This very welcome news came after a week of positive news regarding bitcoin’s future starting with the confirmation of the latest crypto-wallet supporting phone by Samsung, the upcoming network upgrades and increased interest in Bitcoin from tech billionaires.
Ethereum likely played a part in the turn of the market
Bitcoin hit its legendary high of $20000 back in December 2017, but it has been falling ever since to a little over $3000 in the last few months. Analyst Mati Greenspan of eToro stated that the shortage in ethereum caused this occurrence, and the fact that bitcoin has had this boost pulling it out of the bear market phase, it could be all that was needed to see the end of the slump.
Ethereum had been producing 20000 to 30000 ethers a day, that is until the beginning of this year where these numbers have been tapering off with the production of as low as 13000 ethers per day in the past week.
It is not certain whether the upcoming hard fork (scheduled for Feb 27) has something to do with the declining production of ether. However, as reported by Blockchainreporter, the upgrade will see ethereum speeding up its transaction processing time, mining rewards reduced from three to two and improvements on how the network monetizes data storage made.
Crypto Analysts seem to believe that the $4200 resistance level for bitcoin, which it reached only for a few minutes before it fell, could be due to the ‘weekend behavior.’ During weekends, most crypto traders are away hence easier for price manipulation. This assumption is still not proven as no apparent triggers have been visible at the moment.
