XRP instant crash on BitMEX, Steemit switch to TRON and other events of the week

Summing up the past week in the cryptocurrency industry, we recall the instant collapse of XRP on BitMEX, a strangea New York court ruling, blocking accounts on ePayments, and the first $ 10,000 bitcoin test in 2020.

Psychological Mark Test $ 10,000

The week began with an update of the price maximum - for the first time this year, bitcoin rose above the psychological level of $ 10,000.

In the chart below, you can see that the price even touched the $ 10,500 mark several times:

TradingView Bitstamp BTC / USD hourly chart

However, upward impulses are often notwere supported by sufficient trading volumes, and bearish divergences were observed on the RSI indicator. As a result of insufficient buyer pressure, the price fell below $ 10,000 by the end of the week.

According to Arcane Research analysts, the reasons forthere is still optimism - the number of search queries for the phrase “Buy Bitcoin” is growing steadily, contracts on unregulated derivatives exchanges are trading above the spot price, and the “fear and greed index” is at August marks.

Of the top ten CoinMarketCap, Ethereum and Tezos demonstrated good dynamics. The remaining coins sagged a bit.

Bitcoin dominance index at 62.5%, total market capitalization - $ 287 billion.

Bitcoin Enterprise

A rather extravagant decision was made by the Supremecourt in New York, which sentenced to pay the trust of victims of fraud with bitcoin $ 13.8 million. The plaintiff's lawyers intend to recover the amount from the cryptocurrency network.

The victims represented by the trust lost funds inthe result of hacking purses and Ponzi schemes. The defendant in the case was a certain organization Bitcoin Voluntary Associations, which, according to the plaintiff's lawyers, is “the same as the Bitcoin crypto enterprise”.

Trust attorneys plan to recover damagesexacting them from operators of nodes and miners. They argue that since “Bitcoin is an association that is managed,” everyone who receives transaction fees and manages the network should be held accountable.

How the mechanism for recovering funds from the “enterprise” will be implemented in practice remains a mystery.

Social network Steemit switches to TRON

The decentralized social network Steemit and its applications will soon migrate to the TRON blockchain. The transition will take place as part of a strategic partnership between Steemit Inc. and Tron Foundation.

The Tron Foundation claims that the organization did not invest in social networks. Steemit developers made a decision to abandon their own blockchain voluntarily.

“The parties reached a mutual agreementregarding the future of Steemit. It is more than just money. Steemit needs infrastructure and community support for a scalable network that only TRON can provide. ”- said in Steem.

It is also planned to launch a joint accelerator aimed at the development of the Steemit platform.

Now the platform has a million users, while in the TRON blockchain their number exceeds 20 million.

Growing Interest in Futures

The volume of open positions on bitcoin futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has been steadily growing recently.

According to the analyst of The Block, Larry Chermak, this may signal expectations of a short-term increase in the volatility of the underlying asset.

According to the latest CFTC report, there is an increase in long and short positions among large players, while small ones mainly increase their long positions.

The total number of trade participants is also growing:

Among unregulated crypto derivatives, OKEx and Huobi are leading, BitMEX is gradually losing its former position:

Flash Crash on BitMEX

On Thursday, February 13, on the BitMEX derivatives exchange, Ripple's XRP token contract prices at some point fell by almost 60%, reaching $ 0.13.

During a sharp collapse, the price of the XRP index, whichformed on the data exchanges Bitstamp, Coinbase and Kraken, deviated by only a few points. Nevertheless, some traders reported that the stop loss system on BitMEX did not work, because of which the positions were liquidated, and they themselves lost all funds.

The alleged cause of the incident is the low liquidity of the XRP / USD market, which BitMEX launched last week.

DropBit developer arrested for laundering $ 300 million

U.S. authorities arrested Larry Dean Harmon, CEO of DropBit, a Bitcoin wallet developer. He is suspected of laundering more than $ 300 million through the now defunct darknet platform AlphaBay.

Harmon, 36, has been charged with conspiracy to launder money and administer an unlicensed money transfer service. Now he faces up to 30 years in prison.

According to the prosecution, since 2014until 2017, Harmon sold illicit drugs through AlphaBay, sending bitcoins through Helix's own mixing service. It is assumed that during this time he laundered 354,468 BTC - $ 311 million at the time of the transaction, or more than $ 3.7 billion at current prices.

In addition, Harmon owned a darknet search engine called Grams, often used in a single Helix bundle.

Block accounts on ePayments

On February 11, the ePayments payment system suspended operations after an audit by the UK Financial Supervisory Authority (FCA). Users of the service are no longer available any actions on the accounts.

“The decision was made after checking the FCA ePayments anti-money laundering systems, during which the deficiencies requiring elimination were identified”, The statement said.

According to one ePayments user,the company did not send out warning letters before restricting operations. The support service contacted by the client stated that it would take several days to “formulate new rules for working with AML”. At the same time, experts assured that the user’s funds were “reliably protected”.

It soon became known that usersDigital Securities Exchange (DSX), which ePayments Systems called its official agent in 2015, began to withdraw funds from it, fearing possible blocking of accounts.