Bitcoin holds positions above $5000

The cryptocurrency market continued to strengthen on Thursday. Bitcoin reached a key resistance of $ 5,300, Ethereum rose by almost 5% to $ 175, and the XRP price reached $ 0.3375.

In the beginning of 2019, the overall digital currency market capitalization has grown by 16%. Among the five major cryptocurrencies in the first quarter of 2019, the Litecoin rate increased most of all, which increased by 103%. Besides, a significant rise was shown by the EOS coin - 66%. Bitcoin and Ethereum added 11% and 8% respectively, while the XRP rate decreased by 11% in the reporting period. The important theme of the first quarter of 2019 was the holding of initial exchange offers (IEO), which turned out to be very attractive after the successful sale of BitTorrent tokens on the Binance Launchpad. Several cryptocurrency exchanges have launched their own platform analogues. Meanwhile, subsequent sales at Binance Launchpad collected less funds, and investors sold tokens right after the new coin entered the market.

Ripple set in motion large amounts of its assets in XRP. Over the past 48 hours, the company has transferred 107,000,000 XRP worth $ 36.1 million, including the sale of digital assets worth $ 6.7 million to a third party. Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) whales are also involved in the process, moving $ 85.8 million. Since yesterday, the whales have moved bitcoins to the amount of $ 64.3 million. Two BTC transactions in the amount of about $ 10 million were made from unknown purses to crypto-wallet, which can point to the willingness of traders to sell. The rest of the BTC were withdrawn to unknown cryptocars, or from one exchange to another.

The governments of the three countries officially confirmed their interest in issuing government bonds in Bitcoins to raise capital. Afghanistan, Tunisia and Uzbekistan are currently considering the possibility of issuing government bonds in bitcoins, and all three countries are interested in helping the critical sectors of their economies. The attitude of the IMF to such ideas may be ambiguous. This week the IMF and the World Bank launched an internal cryptocurrency to study the blockchain, but a few days before the IMF chairman Christine Lagarde said that blockchain companies are shaking the traditional financial system and affecting its members. If the idea of government securities is implemented via blockchain, this will greatly support the cryptocurrency industry.

Analyst Kevin Dennean said that Bitcoin can return to its historical maximum of $ 20,000 only after 22 years. He believes that Bitcoin is on the path to "bullish growth", but it will take a long time to rise.

The analyst has made such a pessimistic forecast of the future of the first cryptocurrency in his study, where he compared events in the cryptocurrency industry with various falls in financial markets, bitnovosti writes.

He investigated such events, the collapse of the US stock market in 1929, the collapse of the high-tech Nasdaq stock index in 2000, and the fall in oil prices in 2008. The analyst also said that it was not possible to restore the previous highs at every crash. As an example, he cited the collapse of the Japanese stock index Nikkei, which after 30 years still cannot reach its peak in 1989.

In our forecast for Friday, we expect Bitcoin to reverse and reduce the price to the levels of 5275, 5250 and 5220 dollars, decrease of Ethereum to 172, 170 and 167 dollars, and XRP movement to support 0.3350, 0.3330 and 0.3300 dollars.