Many eyes are watching BTC, as both longs and shorts are in danger of potentially getting squeezed.
The wider cryptocurrency market retraced yesterday’s losses and is up 1% over the past 24 hours. Though the price of leading cryptocurrency BTC is only up 0.5% during that span, ETH is up nearly 2%. Cosmos’ ATOM, meanwhile, is up 5%.
Leading headlines in the industry today is the news that Tether, the issuer of the most popular stablecoin, has frozen more than 1 million USDT from a single address. The “AddedBlacklist” function can be seen in this transaction, and the address in question may be found here. The action took place on Dec. 30 but only caught the industry’s attention yesterday.
Though the owner of the affected address is currently unknown, it is safe to assume that the blacklisting is a regulatory action. To date, Tether has blocked more than 500 Ethereum addresses.
NFT Snapshot: OpenSea raises $300 million
OpenSea has closed a Series C funding round worth $300 million, bringing the leading nonfungible token marketplace’s valuation up to $13 billion. Notably, major crypto fund Paradigm participated in the round.
The raise comes amid increasing pressure from market participants, many of whom are eager for OpenSea to launch its own token or interested in moving to a decentralized competitor.
Top altcoin gainers and losers: LINK leads large caps
- ALCX/USDT +17.27%
- DEVT/USDT +13.76%
- PICKLE/USDT +12.95%
- TOWN/USDT -9.08%
- MXT/USDT -8.63%
- KOL/USDT -4.61%
Though Alchemix’s ALCX is leading all altcoins on OKEx today — per the exchange’s default time settings — LINK is the top-performing altcoin with a market capitalization greater than $1 billion.
BTC technical analysis: Long or short squeeze?
The price of BTC continues to hold at a buy-wall of support, represented by the lower bounds of a possible descending triangle formation (blue) — though the upper boundary of the triangle hasn’t been tested particularly often. The ribbon of exponential moving averages on the six-hour timeframe continues to provide some resistance, in confluence with a major Fibonacci retracement level.
Many are expecting volatility in the near term, as both longs and shorts are in danger of getting squeezed.
ETH technical analysis: Buyers looking to take control against BTC
As expected, the price of ETH tested a key point-of-control (blue) against BTC after finding some momentum and support at the six-hour EMA ribbon — which buyers will hope continues to act as support in an effort to firmly overcome the point-of-control.
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Source: https://www.okex.com/academy/en/tether-usdt-blacklist-opensea-raises-300-million-crypto-market-daily/