Crypto Tidbits: Bitcoin At $7,000, FATF Regulation, Coinbase Backs Ethereum DeFi

Another week, another round of Crypto Tidbits. Over the past week, Bitcoin has performed rather well, rallying from $6,100 to $6,800 as of the time of this article’s writing, a few percent shy of the multi-week high of $7,200. Altcoins followed the market leader, posting similar gains.

Bitcoin remains below the key resistance around $7,000, which some analysts have dubbed a “decision point” for the medium-term trend of the asset. With this in mind, BTC could easily reverse lower, though many investors have announced that the asset’s fundamentals are becoming stronger than ever. Placeholder Capital’s Chris Burniske, for instance, wrote that this crisis “will pass, and crypto’s fundamentals will have strengthened through it.”

10/ Most importantly, I hope everyone is staying as well as possible. While the future weeks are full of uncertainty, I know that eventually, this virus will pass, and #crypto's fundamentals will have strengthened through it.

— Chris Burniske (@cburniske) March 21, 2020

This strength in the crypto market comes as the stock market has begun to show signs of weakness, reacting to a rapidly-worsening coronavirus outbreak and record-level unemployment claims in the U.S., which hit 6.6 million this past week.

Whatever the case, the crypto space saw an interesting wee.

Related Reading: Crypto Tidbits: Bitcoin Holds $6,000s, Federal Reserve To Do “QE Infinity,” U.S. Digital Dollar Proposed

Bitcoin & Crypto Tidbits

• Analysts Expect Bitcoin to Pass $20,000 High… Soon: Over the past few weeks, a number of crypto analysts have touted the sentiment that within the coming year, the price of Bitcoin will surpass $20,000 — nearly 200% higher than the current price of $6,700. People touting this sentiment include Galaxy Digital’s Mike Novogratz, Raoul Pal of Real Vision, and Dan Morehead of Pantera Capital — all former institutional traders turned crypto bulls. These investors primarily cite the fact that governments and central banks have been forced to respond to the outbreak with their most drastic measures available, printing money en-masse, which should benefit the scarce Bitcoin and decentralized crypto assets.
• FATF Urges U.S. to Increase Crypto Regulation: At the end of March, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) explained in its latest report on the state of compliance in the U.S. that it is lacking proper crypto regulation. The global financial regulator said that there are “minor deficiencies” in how the U.S. regulates crypto, citing the stat that “30% of all registered CVC [convertible virtual currencies] providers have been inspected since 2014.” Although the U.S. is lacking, it has pledged to make crypto crime a focus; Steven Mnuchin, the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, said that the Treasury will soon roll out “significant new requirements” for crypto assets and their respective service providers.
• Coinbase Injects More Liquidity Into Ethereum DeFi Ecosystem: To support the decentralized finance ecosystem, Coinbase recently announced a $1.1 million investment via its USDC Bootstrap Fund for two projects: $1 million to Uniswap, a decentralized exchange, and $100,000 to PoolTogether, a decentralized “no-loss” lottery. Earlier, Coinbase provided $1 million in USDC to both Compound and dYdX to kickstart the Bootstrap Fund.
• Tron Launches MakerDAO-like App: On March 28th, Sun released the somewhat cryptic tweet seen below, writing “Something new.” and attaching the tweet with an image outlining a “CDP Portal.” Later. it was revealed that what Sun was posting about is a new Tron-based application called “Djed,” a project that touts itself as one that is “building the financial infrastructure for billions of people around the world.” Djed, which has since been renamed to “Just,”  is a decentralized stablecoin solution that will allow users to put up Bittorrent and Tron tokens as collateral for a new stablecoin.

Something new. #DJED #TRON #TRX $TRX pic.twitter.com/k0rbDtjT0Y

— H.E. Justin Sun 孙宇晨 (@justinsuntron) March 28, 2020

• Crypto Stablecoin Demand Explodes: Despite the strong downturn seen in the crypto markets, epitomized by Bitcoin’s 50% decline that transpired on Mar. 12, the amount of Tether’s USDT stablecoin in existence has exploded. In fact, according to industry news aggregator Unfolded, the market capitalization of the asset recently surpassed $6 billion, with $1 billion added to this metric in the past two weeks alone. In an industry valued at under $200 billion, such inflows are clearly dramatic.

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