Crypto Market Update for 19 May 2020: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Chainlink

May 19, 2020 Editor Ethereum 0

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This article provides an overview of how Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Chainlink (LINK) have been doing over the past 24-hour period, covers recent news that might have affected their prices (or might do so in the future), and looks at interesting tweets about these cryptoassets from prominent members of the crypto community.

To give you a rough idea of how well the crypto markets are doing today, 14 out of the top 20 cryptoassets (by market cap) are currently in the red (against the dollar).

All market data used in this article was taken from CryptoCompare around 12:35 UTC on 19 May 2020.

Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin is currently trading at $9,678, which means that it is up 0.82% in the past 24-hour period:

According to data from CryptoCompare, since Halving Day (i.e. May 11), Bitcoin’s price has gone up from an intraday low of $8,488 on that day to $9,355, where it is now, which means an increase of 14.02%.

Crypto analyst/investor Tuur Demeester, Editor-in-Chief of Adamant Research, said in an interview yesterday (May 18) that Bitcoin is in a bull market again, that he doesn’t see the Bitcoin price dropping below the $6,000 level, and can see the Bitcoin price going as far $50,000 or even higher in the future.

Over on Twitter, Demeester talked about Bitcoin’s next “parabolic rally”:

Talking of BTC accumulation, another popular crypto analyst/investor on Twitter says that 2020 could be the last year in which it will be possible to buy Bitcoin at a price below $10,000:

Also, yesterday, Jack Dorsey, who is the CEO of both Square and CEO, demonstrated a very cool new feature in Square’s popular Cash App that should help with helping more people get started with investing in Bitcoin. In short, by enabling dollar cost averaging (DCA) and getting more people to learn to think in terms of satoshis (one Bitcoin is equivalent to 100 milion satoshis) rather than bitcoins, this feature should help with ecouraging even those with a small amount of disposable funds to become Bitcoiners:

Gabor Gurbacs, Director of Digital Assets Strategy at VanEck subsidiary MV Index Solutions (MVIS), believes that it is a common misconception that we need wide mainstream adoption of Bitcoin for Bitcoin’s market cap to reach a similar figure to that of gold (which is around $8 trillion):


Ethereum (ETH)

Ethereum is currently trading at $211.93, which means that it is up 0.47% in the past 24-hour period:

ETH-USD 24 Hour Chart on 19 May 2020.png

In the year-to-date period, Ethereum, the second-most valuable cryptoasset by market cap, has gone up from $128.91 to $200.37, which means an impressive 64.40% (against USD) increase in value.

Regarding last week’s news from Reddit that it is experimenting with a new way (“Community Points”) of rewarding its users that involves two new Ethereum-based tokens (called “MOON” and “BRICK”), Su Zhu, who is the Co-Founder, CIO, and CEO of Singapore-based crypto-focused investment firm Three Arrows Capital, had this to say:

Yesterday (May 18), the team behind Uniswap, which is Vitalik Buterin’s favorite decentralized exchange (DEX) and runs on the Ethereum blockchain, announced that “Uniswap V2, the second iteration of the Uniswap protocol, has been deployed to the Ethereum mainnet.”

Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap, wrote that  Uniswap V2’s list of many new features and enhancements includes “Price Oracles” and “Flash Swaps”.

Chainlink (LINK)

Chainlink’s LINK token is currently trading at $3.686, which means that it is down 1.23% in the past 24-hour period:

LINK-USD 24 Hour Chart on 19 May 2020.png

In the year-to-date period, Chainlink, the 12th most valuable cryptoasset by market cap, has gone up from $1.76 to $3.686, which means an incredible 118.29% (against USD) increase of value.

On Friday (May 15), bZeroX, LLC, which is the startup behind bZx (an open finance protocol that allows building applications that “empower lenders, borrowers, and traders with the most flexible decentralized finance protocol on Ethereum”), made an interesting announcement on its blog:

“As part of a comprehensive effort to harden bZx’s security, we implemented several key protocol improvements to better protect against future attacks. One of the most important upgrades we made was switching our oracle mechanism from the issues caused by a combination of Uniswap and Kyber to Chainlink’s Price Reference Contracts.

“Since integration on March 9th, bZx has remained highly secure thanks to Chainlink’s multiple security guarantees.”

Here are the reasons given for deciding to use Chainlink as their “sole oracle provider”:

  • “Chainlink does not suffer from an insufficiently decentralized oracle, and the security of its infrastructure is able to scale with the value in our contracts.”
  • “Chainlink provides access to high quality data, due being able to access credentialed APIs.”
  • “Chainlink provides high quality node operators, maintains high quality control standards around their nodes, and provides unprecedented transparency regarding their node operators, strengthening the oracle’s reliability in producing consistently trusted oracle reports.”

Featured Image by “WorldSpectrum” via Pixabay.com