Mooners and Shakers: Bitcoin steady as analysts look lower and CommBank hits pause on crypto pilot

Bitcoin is attempting another crack at US$30k support at the time of writing. But there’s hardly oodles of confidence in the market right now – something CommBank is across.

Last November, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia revealed its planned foray into the world of crypto trading. Australia’s largest bank then announced a pilot program for a service that would ultimately enable more than 6.5 million CommBank app users to buy and sell up to 10 cryptos, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin.

The program was underway, too, but as of today its pause button has been hit, with no exact timeframe yet as to when it will resume. The dust stirred up from the Terra LUNA fiasco might need to settle first.

In a tech briefing this week, as reported by The Guardian, the bank’s CEO Matt Comyn noted:

“As events of the last week have reinforced, it is clearly a very volatile sector that remains an enormous amount of interest. But alongside that volatility and awareness and I guess the scale, certainly globally, you can see there is a lot of interest from regulators and people thinking about the best way to regulate that.”

Comyn added that CommBank, which participated in the Gemini crypto exchange and custody firm’s US$400 million funding round last November, still intends to restart the crypto-trading pilot.

But, added the CEO, there are “still a couple of things that we want to work through on a regulatory front to make sure that that is most appropriate”.

Ah well, onwards and upwards… (after chopping sideways or potentially falling off another cliff first).

Top 10 overview

It’s looking just slightly healthier than this time yesterday, as is the industry’s number one sentiment indicator – the Crypto Fear & Greed Index – which we had thought could be a single digit today.

It’s actually up one point out of 100 since Wednesday, which makes it only very marginally less likely to wet its pants in its extremely fearful state.

So what are various analysts seeing today? WhaleMap, which tracks and analyses the trading patterns and movements of large Bitcoin investors, is spotting support levels a fair bit lower than the US$30k the market’s shooting for right now.

About US$24k to $26k is where it’s at, apparently, otherwise… see you down in “goblin town” as the crypto kidz say.

Want something more short-term bullish? Yesterday we said @Roman_Trading has been fairly consistently bearish in recent months, but a good five hours ago (at the time of writing), he was spotting an “inverted head and shoulders” pattern on a low timeframe. That often precedes a move up, although it may have already played out, pulling Bitcoin back above US$30k again.

Not saying it’s a move that’ll sustain, but it seems he’s made another correct short-term call.

Meanwhile, another solid chart watcher, Rekt Capital is one trader who’s been eyeing off the RSI (relative strength index) – which is a “momentum indicator that measures the magnitude of recent price changes to analyse overbought or oversold conditions”, according to Investopedia.

Seeing the Bitcoin RSI this low and “overold” seems kind of tantalising, indicating a market bottom could, in theory, be near.

But… then again… as author and trader “Cheds” pointed out recently, RSI trends can hang around for a long time.

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$11.3 billion to about US$563 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time.

DAILY PUMPERS

• XDC Network (XDC), (market cap: US$589 million) +11%

• Gala (GALA), (mc: US$639 million) +7%

• Synthetix (SNX), (mc: US$604 million) 7%

• Cosmos (ATOM), (mc: US$3.16 billion) 5%

• The Sandbox (SAND), (mc: US$1.59 billion) 5%

DAILY SLUMPERS 

• TerraUSD (UST), (market cap: US$891 million) ($0.078) -22%

DAILY PUMPERS

• DIA (DIA), (market cap: US$43m) +48%

• Marlin (POND), (mc: US$44 million) +41%

• PolySwarm (NCT), (mc: US$37m) +36%

• Keep3rV1 (KP3R), (mc: US$57m) +35%

• RAMP (RAMP), (mc: US$18m) +29%

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Goldfinch (GFI), (market cap: US$13m) -21%

• Retreeb (TREEB), (mc: US$16m) -18%

• Tokemak (TOKE), (mc: US$72m) -16%

• UniLend Finance (UFT), (mc: US$15m) -16%

• Anchor Protocol (ANC), (mc: US$36m) -13%

Around the blocks