After bitcoin hit an all-time high of $58,275 on February 21, investors were looking forward to taking the $60,000 high. However, there was a sudden reversal and a sharp drop of 23% to $44,985. According to many experts, the trigger of the massive profit fixation by "whales" was the statement of the former head of the Fed and now the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on the speculative nature of cryptocurrency and the possibility of using it for money laundering. According to analyst Sven Henrich, the head of the Ministry of Finance has actually declared war on bitcoin.
“Digital currencies can provide faster and cheaper payments. But there are many issues to be explored, including consumer protection and money laundering,” Janet Yelen said, also mentioning the possibility of launching the Central Bank's own digital currency (CBDC).
The fall in bitcoin could also have been facilitated by the fall in global indices of technology companies, as well as the beginning of a large-scale vaccination against coronavirus.
- According to Bloomberg, against the background of the decline in the bitcoin rate, the head of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, lost the first place in the ranking of the richest people on the planet. Tesla shares fell 8.6%, causing Musk to lose $15.2 billion. Shortly before the decline, the company announced that it had added $1.5 billion in bitcoin to its balance sheet. At the same time, the fall in bitcoin, according to Bloomberg, may be partly related to the statement of Musk himself, who called the prices of cryptocurrencies too high.
- Due to technical failures, some customers of the Philippine crypto exchange PDAX were able to buy bitcoin almost 10 times cheaper than the market price, Bitpinas reports. One of the users admitted that he bought bitcoins for 300,000 pesos ($6,150), while the average market price of BTC was about $50,000, after which he transferred the cryptocurrency to his wallet.
A day later, PDAX sent him a letter demanding the return of the bitcoins, but the buyer's lawyer claims that "the transaction was legitimate, in accordance with applicable laws, and PDAX cannot withdraw transactions unilaterally."
Another client of this crypto exchange unexpectedly found 40 billion Philippine pesos or about 820 million dollars in his account. It is not reported whether he was able to withdraw this "_gift" from PDAX.
- Three platforms - Binance, Huobi and OKEx - account for 75% of the total trading volume on crypto exchanges, according to BDCenter Digital. The safest exchanges were Kraken, Coinbase and Binance.
The study showed that the number of cryptocurrency users has almost tripled since 2018 and reached 191 million users from over 150 countries in the third quarter of 2020. At the same time, the researchers emphasize that the availability of an exchange in a country does not mean the actual availability of all its products and functionality. So the purchase of cryptocurrencies using a credit card is supported only by 65% of sites.
- One of the world's largest money transfer services, MoneyGram, refused to use the product based on the XRP token due to the claims of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against Ripple. This is stated in a report by the company.
Against the backdrop of SEC claims, in addition to MoneyGram, Coinbase and OKCoin, Galaxy Digital, Bitstamp, B2C2, eToro and Kraken have already refused to support the XRP token. Asset management company Grayscale Investments announced the liquidation of an XRP-based investment trust, and 21Shares has excluded the Ripple token from its traded exchange products.
- Australian authorities have charged a Sydney resident suspected of drug trafficking, money laundering and bitcoin money laundering for a total of $4.3 million. The police found two bags with $1 million in cash in his car, and seized mobile phones, a laptop and a batch of illegal substances from his home.
Recall that in January 2021, the owner of the RG Coins cryptocurrency exchange Rossen Iosifov already received 121 months in prison for laundering about $5 million using digital assets.
- Analysts reviewed publications about cryptocurrency exchanges in various media. Cointelegraph was the leading media outlet by the number of articles. The first place in popularity was taken by English, the second - Russian.
According to BDCenter Digital, 12 out of 100 Twitter posts are about cryptocurrency. In just the week of February 7-14, Twitter users mentioned bitcoin over 675,000 times. The last record was set on January 10, when the weekly number of posts mentioning bitcoin reached 576,000.
- According to a responsible representative of the Russian Orthodox Church, it does not plan to create its own cryptocurrency to accept donations. The church has also refused to accept bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. At the same time, according to Metropolitan Hilarion, believers may well make donations to the church using the phone.
- According to the co-founder of Morgan Creek Digital Assets Anthony Pompliano, the main cryptocurrency may reach $500 thousand by the end of this decade, and even $1 million in the long term.
However, the growth of cryptocurrency quotes may stop due to the rapid recovery of the global economy after the recession caused by the coronavirus epidemic. In this case, central banks will begin to roll back their quantitative easing programs, raise interest rates, stop buying assets and printing cheap money. As a result, investment flows into bitcoin, as one of the most attractive safe havens, can dry up very quickly.
- The largest developer of graphics processors, the American technology company Nvidia has announced plans to release a series of video cards specifically for mining the Ethereum cryptocurrency, which is the second after bitcoin. According to CNBC, the new type of GPU is called CMP (Crypto Mining Processor) and can appear in the market already in March 2021.