Market Overview: Polkadot and Uniswap up 8% and Coinbase Fined For Wash Trading

0

Last Updated on 20 March 2021 by CryptoTips.eu

Jeroen Kok

Jeroen is one of the lead copywriters on Cryptotips.eu and discusses all recent events in the crypto market. This includes news updates, but also price analyzes and more. He developed his passion for cryptocurrency during the bull run in 2017. He has learned a lot since then. The combination of cryptocurrency and creative writing is perfect for Jeroen and an excellent way to share his knowledge with a wide audience. Find me on LinkedIn / jeroen@cryptotips.eu
View all posts

Bitcoin continues to trade just off it’s all-time-high of $61,000 as the weekend starts (usually a bullish time) and is trading at $59,000 at the time of writing.

As soon as Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention trades around the same price for a few days, we will designate it as boring. Tech stocks rebounded after Thursday’s sell-off in the US and Coinbase was fined $6 million by US authorities, among other things for a practice called wash trading.

Advertentie.

Crypto top 10 in the green

Bitcoin trades at $59,000 at the time of writing as it enters the weekend. With stock markets closed, retail investors have got the crypto market mostly to themselves although whales have been known in the past to group together and cause a spike (whether up or down).

Ethereum trades around $1,800 at the time of writing and seems ready to break out in any direction. Binance Coin and Cardano, which make up the rest of the top 5 on CoinMarketCap, are steady.

However, more interesting price action is noticeable within the crypto top 10. Polkadot and Uniswap are outperforming the other top projects and both are 8% in the green. XRP and Chainlink are currently up almost 3%.

Tech rebounds as banks sink

Over in the stock markets, the US session once again ended mixed (the Nasdaq and the Dow Jones have been trading out of sync for a few weeks now, worrying many).

The tech-heavy Nasdaq rebounded after Thursday’s brutal selloff while the Dow was down because of comments by the Federal Reserve that US banks could not count on a planned extension that would allow them to stock up on Treasury bonds without the need to set aside excess capital to compensate for them.

Worries about inflation increased although Fed boss Jay Powell claimed in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal that he would provide support “for as long as it takes”, reiterating former ECB President (and current Italian Prime Minister) Mario Draghi’s famous words when he committed to saving the Euro.

Coinbase fined

Over on crypto exchanges there was some bad news for Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong as his platform was fined $6.5 million by the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) because of a series of allegations.

One of these claimed that a Coinbase employee, who remains unnamed, had engaged in so-called wash trading.

In fact, the employee (who has since left Coinbase) was accused of:

Intentionally placing buy and sell orders in the Litecoin/Bitcoin trading pair on GDAX that matched each other as wash trades.

In doing so, he created the impression that volume on Litecoin / Bitcoin was artificially higher than it actually was, which caused more buyers to come in, causing a spike in the price.