The 27 February is going to be a big day in cryptoland.
It is the day when Ethereum tries to get Constantinople out of the door again and also when the US Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to make a decision on the latest ETF offering seeking approval.
The VanEck bitcoin ETF is highly unlikely to get the nod from the SEC but it won't stop people hyper-ventilating about the possibility and the market could react negatively when it is rejected, even though it is expected to be.
A major reason for the SEC's reticence regarding crypto ETFs is the state of the market. Its fears about manipulation will not have been assuaged by the price gyrations concerning Apollo. The price of APL was up 400% in the past week but is down 45% today.
The crypto community is shouting "pump and dump". In the Telegram channel everyone is shouting "who dumped", but its a reasonable bet that it was one of the project insiders, say critics.
A reddit post we cited yesterday looks like they called it accurately, with the price plummeting today.
Exchange blues – CoinZest and Cryptopia
Even if there is no manipulation involved in the Apollo price gyrations, the volatility, for whatever reason, is not a place institutional investors et alone retail ones, want to be. For the traders it's of course a different matter.
And the lack of market oversight extends to the exchanges. The latest example of the lack of proficiency and security is business oprtations comes from SOuth Korean exchangeCoinZest.
Unbelievably, the exchange managed to send $5 million worth of BTC to its customers instead of an airdrop of the We Game Token (WGT). It blamed a computer error.
The price of BTC on CoinZest started to drop (by about $800) as customers tried to offload their newfound wealth. The news has only just emerged but the fiasco went down on 18 January.
Over in New Zealand, the police are apparently "making progress" in the investigation into the hack at the Cryptopia exchange. The investigation "is expected to take some time to complete" but the exchange's team is "cooperating with police and providing considerable assistance", which is nice.
Checkout the NZ police report here. Sadly the hack cold spell the end for Cryptopia as no one in their right mind is going to want to hold funds with it.
Digital gold
Elsewhere, Willy Woo, famed for developing the metrics to value bitcoin using the network value to transactions (NVT) ratio, put out an interesting tweet . yesterday:
https://twitter.com/woonomic/status/1087286230985797633
- woonomic
That's a lot of room for bitcoin to grow into.
BTC tx volumes
And another useful tweet from Satoshi Capital Research points out that that tx volume of BTC was $3.2 trillion in 2018 - that's six times the volume sent by PayPal. Having said that , PayPal users are buying stuff and BTC users are mostly trading (trading vol = $2.2 trillion).
https://twitter.com/chartingbitcoin/status/1087528609517109250
- chartingbitcoin
Posted from Coinintelnews.com with SteemPress : https://coinintelnews.com/crypto-double-header-27-february-is-vaneck-etf-day-and-constantinople-upgrade/