Crypto Market Forecast: The week ahead, 15th April

After a period of explosive gains at the beginning of April, global crypto markets have consolidated over the last week. Most assets traded in the red as they hit new resistance levels. Market benchmark Bitcoin fell approximately 2%, while the two largest altcoins Ethereum and XRP fell 8% and 10% respectively. The overall market cap for crypto assets dropped 6%.

Momentum still leans bullish with the price of Bitcon up an impressive 30% in the last month, with the overall crypto market cap up 29% over the same period. This suggests that last week’s price movement represents a healthy pull-back as traders secure profits and the market looks to consolidate at these new levels.

In wider industry news, popular but controversial YouTuber Pewdiepie, announced that he would begin publishing exclusive live streaming content on blockchain based video streaming platform DLive. The DLive platform doesn’t take a cut of revenue generated by content creators through channel subscription fees and gifts. Pewdiepie, real name Felix Kjalleberg, has stated that he is excited to join a platform where he feels like he is a “real partner”.

Pewdiepie conducted his first DLive stream on Sunday April 14th and he has already gained 173,300 DLive subscribers (he has 93 million YouTube subscribers). The use of DLive by Pewdiepie is likely to generate increased interest around the blockchain social media space. PewDiePie’s sometimes edgy content has generated controversy which led to some of his videos being demonetized by YouTube.

Brave new coin researcher Andrew Gillick recently published a report evaluating the potential of decentralized blockchain based content models to disrupt traditional digital legacy systems, (which favour large middlemen) by giving power back to communities and content creators.

The recent market performance for crypto assets supporting decentralized media platforms is mixed with the Brave browser based BAT token rising 0.05% in the last week. The native token for the decentralized social media platform, STEEM, fell 15%.

This weeks events in crypto

April 16th – RunEVM

The RunEVM meetup, a significant event within the Ethereum developer community, takes place in Berlin this Monday. The event focuses on building using Ethereum’s virtual machine and will feature speakers such as Ethereum developer, Greg Colvin, and Chief Security engineer for the Trail of Bits platform, Josselin Feist. On a recent Ethereum developer call, developers said they were considering smaller and more frequent developer hard forks. This would allow for unique forks specific to individual disputes and changes.

April 17 and 18 – IOHK summit 2019

IOHK is an engineering and technology company building on the Cardano and Ethereum Classic blockchains. The event will focus on updating the community on the development of the Cardano blockchain. IOHK founders Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood are headline speakers. The event agenda includes panels on the development of key Cardano projects such as the Daedalus wallet.

April 17th – ODE drop for KCS holders

Kucoin are running an airdrop for holders of their exchange token Kucoin-shares (KCS) this Tuesday. Holders will be recieve educational sector token ODE this Tuesday. The price of KCS has risen 47% in the last 30 days and an impressive 135% in the last 90, driven by new found utility as an IEO membership token. This latest event may help drive more short term momentum.

Marcap top 10

It was a red week for large cap coins, with most markets retracing or consolidating following a period of strong gains in early April. Outside of the top 10, tokens like MKR suffered heavily during the pullback. As reported by Cryptocurrencynewsfeed, the Maker DAO voted to increase the DAI Contract stability fee (an interest rate, paid in MKR) from 7.5% to 11.5%. This decreases the demand to issue new DAI, and the MKR required to pay interest on these loans.

BLX- 7 days

The price of BTC ranged between $5000-$5200 for most of last week. It is possible that Bitcoin has found its new consolidation range. Between December and March the price of Bitcoin ranged between $3800-4100 and before that between $6200-$6500 for an extended period between September to November. In both cases a new range was found after a short, sharp unexpected price move that drove an extreme increase in buying/selling pressure. There are signs that Bitcoin may have found a new multi-month price range and observers may want to prepare for a period of tepid price movements in the BTC markets.