Bitcoin (BTC) wobbled around $40,000 as investors waited for the United States Federal Reserve to release its new set of economic projections on Wednesday. The market's focus shifted to two important questions: Will United States central bank officials signal their intentions to raise interest rates in 2023 instead of 2024? And how much do they think inflation will rise in the remainder of 2021 and in the next year? Taper tantrum In March, the last Fed projection saw 11 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) officials agreeing to keep interest rates near zero at least until 2023. That suggested a tightening …

Analysts at thAmerican multinational investment bank Morgan Stanley have estimated the likely changes in eurozone banks’ deposits should a digital euro be widely adopted. According to the analysts, a European Union central bank digital currency (CBDC) could suck up 8% of customer deposits from eurozone banks, Reuters reported Wednesday. This share may be far higher in smaller countries like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Greece, they said. The analysts’ estimates were based on a “bear case” scenario in which all eurozone citizens over the age of 15 sent 3,000 euros ($3,637) into a digital euro wallet controlled by the …

Traditional hedge funds are willing to increase their exposure in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency markets over the next five years, a new survey has found. Intertrust Global, an international trust and corporate management company, polled the chief financial officers of 100 hedge funds globally about their intention to purchase crypto assets. About 98% of them responded that they expect their hedge funds to have invested 7.2% of their assets in cryptocurrencies by 2026. The survey found that a 7.2% investment into the cryptocurrency sector would equal about $312 billion if replicated across the sector. Meanwhile, about 17% of the polled …

Polkadot's DOT coin has witnessed massive upside moves recently as traders assess the cryptocurrency's entry into the United States-based digital assets trading platform Coinbase Pro and the upcoming auctioning of parachain slots atop Polkadot's testbed version of Kusama on June 15. The DOT/USD exchange rate reached $26.44 on June 14, following a roughly 37% upside move that started on June 13. Nevertheless, entering the Asia-Pacific and European trading hours on June 15, the pair corrected by more than 4.5%, hitting an intraday low of $24.25. Initial upside moves in the DOT market surfaced in the wake of the Bitcoin (BTC) …

A run-up toward $40,000 in the Bitcoin (BTC) market risked exhaustion as Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s futures opened on Monday with a gap of $1,575, the first since May 17. In retrospect, the downside risks heightened due to Bitcoin’s recent bearish pullbacks near the $40,000 level. Atop that, the said CME gap formed between Friday’s close of $37,325 and Monday’s open of $38,900, raising possibilities that the next correction would prompt Bitcoin bids to fall to at least $37,325. That is due to a general psychological notion among traders that BTC/USD reverses its trends to fill Bitcoin futures gaps more than …

Bitcoin (BTC) logged its best daily performance on Wednesday since Feb. 8, the day Tesla announced that it had added $1.5 billion worth of BTC to its balance sheet. The flagship cryptocurrency surged 11.98% to $37,573 after El Salvador President Nayib Bukele passed legislation that approved it as a legal tender. In short, the Central American nation will now be able to price goods and services in BTC and will even accept the cryptocurrency for tax payments. Meanwhile, Bukele clarified that his government would not impose capital gains tax on Bitcoin investors. He also announced that El Salvador would use …

JPMorgan’s cryptocurrency market analysts have pointed to the difference between Bitcoin’s (BTC) spot prices and BTC futures prices as a potential bearish sign for the market. In a Thursday note to clients, JPMorgan analysts led by global market strategist Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote that the Bitcoin market has returned to backwardation — a situation when the spot price is above futures prices. The analysts said that the past month’s correction in crypto markets saw Bitcoin futures reversing into backwardation for the first time since 2018. According to the strategists, Bitcoin futures backwardation should be viewed as a negative sign for BTC …

Bitcoin (BTC) price reclaimed $36,000 heading into the New York session Wednesday as investors awaited fresh data on inflation in May and El Salvador approved a bill that made cryptocurrencies a legal tender in the country. Bull-market bottom? The benchmark cryptocurrency surged 9.86% to an intraday high of $36,696, wiping off a portion of the losses it incurred in the previous session. In retrospect, the BTC/USD exchange rate had fallen to almost $31,000 on Tuesday over fears that the pair has entered a 2018-like bearish phase after topping out near $65,000 in mid-April. #Bitcoin on the charts: Key levels to …

United Kingdom-based fund manager Ruffer liquidated its $600-million Bitcoin (BTC) bet after growing nervous about the speculative frenzy in the cryptocurrency market, including huge rallies in meme-based tokens such as Dogecoin (DOGE). The fund, which manages roughly $34 billion for wealthy clients and charities, started selling its cryptocurrency stash in December 2020, when the BTC/USD exchange rate rose to $25,000, the Sunday Times reported. It continued selling as the pair established newer highs in January 2021, breaking past the $40,000 level. Ruffer had wound up its remaining Bitcoin position by April, netting $1.1 billion in profits from the sales, or …

May was a testing time for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC). The flagship digital asset was already wobbling after rallying to nearly $65,000 in mid April, owing to profit-taking sentiment among traders. Elon Musk accelerated the sell-off by reversing his company's plans to accept Bitcoin as payment for Tesla's electric cars. Later in the month, the People's Bank of China reiterated to the country's financial institutions against the use of virtual currencies for payments. Chinese authorities are also starting to keep a close eye on crypto mining — the process by which computers mine cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. More blows to the …

A recent run-up in Ether (ETH) prices against its top rival, Bitcoin (BTC), appears to be at the risk of exhaustion, even as analysts see the second-largest cryptocurrency as the stronger of the two. The ETH/BTC exchange rate has risen by up to 40.19% after bottoming out at 0.0553 BTC on May 23. The powerful rebound move reflected a spike in the capital flow from the spot ETH to spot BTC market. That also led analysts at Delphi Digital, an independent market research firm, to highlight Ether's "formidable strength" in the Bitcoin-quoted markets. They wrote: "If you look at the …

A lackluster balance sheet, excessive debt load and over-leveraged exposure to Bitcoin have crashed MicroStrategy stock by more than 63% since February already. Nevertheless, the business intelligence company has ignored the risks of its frothy valuations, and it now wants to raise more debt and buy Bitcoin with proceeds (BTC). MicroStrategy announced on June 7 that it "intends to raise $400 million aggregate principal amount of senior secured notes in private offering [...] to acquire additional Bitcoins." The company already holds more than 92,000 BTC, worth about $3.31 billion at current exchange rates — almost 1.5x its principal investment. MSTR …