Bitcoin prices are caught in a downdraft, after a series of rallies in recent weeks that repeatedly fizzled out at the $10,000 mark.  “There is no clear understanding where bitcoin will go,” Yuriy Mazur, head of data analytics at cryptocurrency exchange CEX.IO told CoinDesk’s Omkar Godbole. “It may either retrace back to $6,500 or reach $10,000.” You’re reading First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily markets newsletter. Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context every wild swing in bitcoin and more. We follow the money so you don’t have to. You can subscribe here. Source: TradingViewWith the near-term picture cloudy, some analysts are focusing on a longer-term trend that...

Bitcoin moved back over $9,000 earlier on Tuesday alongside signs of an improved risk appetite in the traditional markets.  Prices rose to a high of $9,010 at 08:05 UTC, but quickly fell back below $8,900, pouring cold water over excitement generated by Monday’s 2.3% bounce from the two-week low of $8,630.  At press time, the number one cryptocurrency by market value is changing hands near $8,860, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index.  Meanwhile, the futures tied to the S&P 500, Wall Street’s equity index, are reporting over 2% gains Tuesday. Major European equity indexes are flashing green, too, with the U.K.’s FTSE index leading the way with a 1.33% gain, as per Investing.com. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude, North America’s oil benchmark, has so far scored a 2.4% gain on ...

India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, CoinDCX, has secured a $2.5 million strategic investment led by Polychain Capital with support from Coinbase Ventures. The investment aims to reinforce the exchange’s efforts to drive cryptocurrency adoption in the country after a major legal victory in March. CoinDCX’s #TryCrypto campaign seeks to bring the total number of crypto users in India to 50 million. Specifically, the financing aims to bolster CoinDCX’s meetup events, community engagement efforts, educational programs and consumer campaigns, the company said. “This new strategic investment into CoinDCX is a shot of confidence in our roadmap toward bringing the crypto asset class to a largely untapped Indian market. We look forward to our investors’ continued counsel,” said Sumit Gupta, CEO...

Binance is forced to “technically” support last week’s hard fork of the Steem blockchain, according to the crypto exchange’s CEO, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao. In a statement on the company’s official blog Sunday, CZ said that, while the exchange is “very much against zeroing other people’s assets on the blockchain,” to not support it would mean that Binance users would not be able to withdraw their steem tokens. The result of a dispute in the Steem community over the acquisition of SteemIt – the blockchain ecosystem’s biggest and more powerful application – by Tron and Justin Sun, the hard fork was used as a tool to strip 64 dissenters of their token holdings. At the time around $6.3 million-worth of cryptocurrency was grabbed, with one of the affected parties, Dan Hensley, saying he alone had los...

The credibility of Craig Wright – the Australian tech entrepreneur who controversially claims to be bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto – has taken another blow. After a list of bitcoin addresses Wright had provided as being his holdings in an ongoing court case were briefly and “inadvertently” made public by plaintiffs on May 21, 145 of the addresses were used to sign a public message both calling Wright a “fraud” and making it plain that he does not in fact own or control them. The court case was brought by Ira Kleiman, the brother of Wright’s former business partner, David Kleiman, and seeks half of 1.1 million bitcoin (worth around $9.6 billion) the two allegedly mined in the early days of the cryptocurrency, as well as intellectual property. The case hinges on whether W...

Mining reward halvings are a hot topic in the crypto markets, as they alter a cryptocurrency’s supply and often have a significant impact on prices.  Bitcoin, the biggest cryptocurrency by market value, underwent its third halving on May 11, which reduced the reward per block mined to 6.25 bitcoin from 12.5. Bitcoin offshoots bitcoin cash and bitcoin SV also witnessed halvings in April.  Next in line is zcash (ZEC), a privacy-focused cryptocurrency first created in 2016 that uses a proof-of-work (or mining) algorithm and encrypts user information within shielded transactions. Currently, it is the 26th largest cryptocurrency by market value, as per data source CoinMarketCap. Rewards per block mined on the zcash blockchain – launched and supported by the Electric Coin Company – are schedule...

With bitcoin’s price losing altitude again, small investors appear to be seeking exposure to the top cryptocurrency by market value. Prices fell by 9.8% last week to register bitcoin’s biggest weekly decline since the second week of March, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index. A two-week low of $8,630 was registered early on Monday, with prices last seen at $8,730 – down over 11% from the post-halving high of $9,960 registered on May 18.  Despite the price drop – or perhaps because of it – the number of addresses holding smaller amounts of bitcoin has continued to rise.  The number of unique addresses holding at least 0.01 BTC (around $87 at press time) rose to a new high of 8,478,746 on Sunday, according to data provided by blockchain intelligence firm Glassnode. Meanwhile, the nu...