Binance coin price is gaining bullish momentum above the $20.50 resistance against the USDT. BNB price action suggests bitcoin could also start a decent upward move if it remains stable above $9,000.

In the past few sessions, binance coin followed a bullish path above the $19.00 and $20.00 resistance levels. BNB price even settled above the $20.00 resistance area and the 100 simple moving average (4-hours).

It opened the doors for more gains above the 50% Fib retracement level of the last key decline from the $23.25 high to $17.69 low. The price is now trading above the $21.00 resistance area.

During the rise, there was a break above a major bearish trend line with resistance near $19.98 on the 4-hours chart of the BNB/USDT pair. It seems like the bulls are currently facing hurdles near the $21.15 and $21.20 levels.

Binance Coin Price

The 61.8% Fib retracement level of the last key decline from the $23.25 high to $17.69 low is also acting as a strong resistance. If binance coin cryptocurrency surges above the $21.15 and $21.20 levels, it could continue to rise towards the $22.00 and $23.00 levels.

The market sentiment is also likely to improve if the price gains pace above $21.20 and it might help bitcoin in rising steadily towards $9,200 or $9,340.

If BNB fails to clear the $21.15 and $21.20 resistance levels, it could start a downside correction. An initial support is seen near the $20.50 level. If the bulls fail to defend the $20.50 support, the price might retest the $20.00 support area.

Any further losses could push the bulls on the back foot and the price is likely to slide towards the $18.80 support level in the near term. Overall, the current price action is positive and there are chances of more gains above $21.20.

Technical Indicators

4-Hours MACD The MACD for BNB/USDT is slowly gaining momentum in the bullish zone.

4-Hours RSI (Relative Strength Index) The RSI for BNB/USDT is currently well above the 55 level.

Major Support Levels $20.50, $20.00 and $18.80.

Major Resistance Levels $21.15, $21.20 and $22.00.

Originally posted here:
Binance Coin (BNB) Cryptocurrency Is Surging: Here's How It Can Refuel BTC - newsBTC

The $245bn cryptocurrency industry needs to do more to secure its digital assets if it wishes to continue to grow according to a new report from KPMG.

Since 2017, hackers have stolen at least $9.8bn in digital assets as a result of weak security or poorly written code, the accounting firm said in its report titled Cracking Crypto Custody.

As institutional investors have adopted cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, this has led to a competition for a place in their portfolios and safeguarding these digital tokens is more important than ever. Co-author of the report and co-leader of KPMG's cryto-asset services, Sal Ternullo explained why security is holding investors back from acquiring more cryptocurrency in a statement, saying:

Institutional investors especially, will not take positions in cryptoassets if their value cannot be custodied and safeguarded in the same way traditional assets are.

Custody services for cryptocurrencies have begun to spring up and Fidelity Investments along with units from the cryptocurrency exchanges Intercontinental Exchange, Coinbase and Gemini have begun to offer them to investors.

In the same way that cash and certain types of bonds are bearer investments where whoever holds them is the owner, so to are cryptocurrencies. However, the private keys, which are a string of characters stored in a digital wallet or written down on paper, are quite easy to misplace.

When a user loses their private key or has it stolen, the asset is gone forever and this makes key custody a major challenge for traditional financial firms that are more familiar with protecting non-digital assets. KPMG explained why custody is so important to the continued growth of the cryptocurrency market in its report, saying:

Custody the management of cryptographic private keys that cryptoasset owners use to execute transactions is a critical building block for crypto insitutionalization. It is fundamental to earning customer trust in cryptoassets and allowing the market to scale. As crypto-assets proliferate, custodians have a tremendous opportunity to profit -- both by earning management fees for delivering straightforward custodian services, and also by offering adjacent services only possible in the emerging crypto ecosystem.

If cryptocurrencies are to continue to be bought and traded by institutional investors, then the industry needs to ensure that it can secure them first.

Via Bloomberg

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Nearly $10bn worth of cryptocurrency was stolen in the past three years - TechRadar

Trading volume on LocalBitcoins fell to a 7-year low, Ethereum Classic developers named the date of the next hard fork, Huobi stock exchange launched a test network of its token. We have made a selection of the important news from last weekend.

With Born2Invest mobile application, you can access the daily financial news updated throughout the day, the evolution of economic indicators and the latest business happenings in the sector. All the latest news in Born2Invest are now easily accessible from your Android and iOS devices.

Over the past three days, several events have occurred on the cryptocurrency market, which could affect both the value of individual coins and the market capitalization. The main ones are in our selection.

Huobi cryptocurrency exchange has announced the launch of a test network of its own Huobi Token. Against this background, the price of altcoin rose by 12% to $5.4. To date, it has dropped to its previous level of $4.65.

The number of trades on a p2p-platform for buying and selling LocalBitcoins cryptocurrency fell to a 7-year low. From February 16th to 22d, this figure was about 3,144 BTC, which corresponds to the values of July 2013, when the company has just started working.

The decline in Bitcoin trading volume on LocalBitcoins can be caused by several reasons. These include stricter requirements for user identification, cancellation of the possibility to make transactions in person and the growing competition from other sites.

The Ethereum Classic development team has scheduled the next update of the cryptocurrency network to block 10 500 839. It will take place approximately on June, 10th, but the date may change, it depends on the ETC miners extraction speed.

The previous Ethereum Classic Agharta update took place on January, 12th. The price of altcoin started to rise in early December and, in only two months, increased by more than 250% from $3.4 to $13.

On March 1st, the price of Bitcoin rose to $8,740, a few hours later it dropped to $8,410. At the moment, the coin is worth $8,650, a daily increase in the price of 1.1%.

Blockchain start-up Ripple unlocked 1 billion XRP tokens, after which 900 million of them were returned to the storage. That is likely due to the companys new policy aimed at reducing the sales of its coins.

At the same time, Ripple technical director David Schwartz said that the startup is developing a new feature, which will make it possible to release stablecoins on the XRP token block.

In the browser version of the Binance exchange, there is a possibility of P2P trading. Now users can directly exchange BTC, ETH, BNB, BUSD and USDT coins with zero transaction fees. Previously, this feature was only available in the companys mobile application.

The number of transactions in the Bitcoin network has overcome the mark of 3.1 billion. The majority of transfers were made in 2019, for 12 months this figure was $1.1 billion.

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Latest news on the cryptocurrency market - Born2Invest

UKRAINE - 2020/02/27: In this photo illustration one hundred US dollar banknotes are seen displayed. ... [+] (Photo Illustration by Sergei Chuzavkov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The cryptocurrency enthusiasts are at it again, with a new name and even more ambitious goals than before: now they want a national digital currency. Hurry! The Chinese will beat us to it, and well be left behind!

Somehow, no one in the debate acknowledges the obvious fact that we already HAVE a national digital currency. Its fast, cheap and secure! It has no issue with regulators, and its accepted everywhere. Who knew? Its called the US dollar. The wild-eyed national digital currency groupies prefer to ignore the fact yes, its a fact that the US dollar is a digital currency. Instead, theyre convinced it cant possibly be a good thing, because its not based on brand-new, cool, immutable distributed ledger blockchain-based cryptocurrency technology. Bzzzt! Wrong.

The people who talk about national digital currency are obsessively focused on cryptocurrencies. They make believe digital currencies are a recent invention, and that only things that have evolved from Bitcoin meet the description. Nonetheless, by any reasonable definition, here in the good old USA we already have a digital currency. Its called the US dollar. Its managed by the Federal Reserve Bank. But thats not digital, you might say what about that green stuff in my wallet, and those coins jangling in my pocket or purse?

I agree, we have cash. As of Feb 12, 2020 there was $1.75 trillion worth of paper cash in various denominations in circulation. Thats quite a bit. But its far from the whole story. For the rest of the story, we turn to the money supply, the total amount of which is one of the chief responsibilities of the Fed to maintain and grow and shrink, as needed. There are two main measures of the money supply, M1 and M2. See this for the Feds definition. Basically, M2 includes checking and savings bank deposits, money market funds, and similar cash-equivalents. As of December 2019, M2 was $15.434 trillion dollars.

What this means is simple: almost 90% of US dollars have no physical existence they are purely digital. But this isnt just for the USA; world-wide, only 8% of currency exists as physical cash!

The US dollar took many steps over more than a century to evolve from physical cash to todays largely digital currency. First, paper currency wasnt real money it was a promise by a bank to trade the paper for the equivalent in gold. For example, heres a $5,000 bill from 1882 thats a promise to exchange for $5,000 in gold coin on demand:

Bureau of Engraving and Printing color specimen of a $5,000 Gold certificate, Series of 1882

In practice, no one exchanged these large-dollar notes for gold; they were mostly used by banks and the government to move funds between themselves, a practice which stopped in 1934.

Long before the advent of computers, the gold exchange promise was dropped. Heres a bill as printed in 1928 that simply declares that its $5,000:

1928 Federal Reserve note

The last high-denomination bills were printed in 1945. Large inter-bank transfers were done without the exchange of cash; tightly controlled procedures were used to transfer money between bank ledgers before the advent of computers. In 1969 the large bills were officially discontinued, and the government started destroying them. In 1975, the government started depositing social security payments into recipients accounts electronically. By 1990, all money transfers between commercial and central banks were done electronically.

There is no single date when you can say that the dollar became digital. The process of transformation took place step by step, each leading to the next. The early steps took place long before computers; the principle was established and in universal use among banks and the federal reserve already in 1945! The invention and use of computers simply enabled further automation of the digitization of the US dollar, and enabled fully real-time transfers to take place.

What all this adds up to is that the US dollar is a national digital currency, by any reasonable definition, and has been for years. The vast majority of currency value is fully and completely digital, and all large-dollar transactions are completely digital. We also have cards, which are smaller, lighter and more convenient than smartphones, with the added convenience that they dont crash or run out of power. In addition, we have the added convenience of physical cash, 100% interchangeable with its digital currency equivalent, as we see with ATMs every day. Cash is convenient for small transactions and for people who dont have working, powered and connected small computers on their person. The US dollar is indeed a national digital currency, with the added convenience of cards and cash.

The vast majority of people know through everyday experience that the US dollar is a national digital currency. But almost no one talks in those terms.When people use that recently-coined term, they usually means something brand-new, a form of cryptocurrency. For example, a recent WSJ article describes a push towards a national digital currency. One of the quoted authors waxes eloquent about its virtues, but never really says what it is.

The only way to understand national digital currency is to back up and look at the history of where the concept came from. While no one likes to talk about it, the undisputed origin of the concept is a brilliant, well-implemented and widely used body of software called Bitcoin. The concept and every major feature of Bitcoin was designed to operate with no central authority of any kind in charge. Amazing. How can it be that anyone anywhere could declare themselves to be a Bitcoin bank (they call them miners) and the system works? See this for an explanation. Bitcoin was also designed to give total anonymity to the people who deposit, send and receive Bitcoin, making it a favorite of international criminals around the world.

Before long, Bitcoin competitors appeared, each claiming to add or correct something important in Bitcoin; for example, Ethereum introducing the so-called smart contract. Next, people started talking about blockchain and the distributed immutable ledger, taking out the concept of currency. Supposedly, these technologies would solve long-standing problems involving data that was in many locations. This led to loads of blockchain start-ups and service companies, with giant corporations infected with bad cases of FOMO funding pilots and proofs-of-concept. Major companies like Microsoft and IBM now offer blockchain-as-a-service in their cloud products.

More recently, we have seen highly publicized efforts to legitimize something like an enhanced Ethereum-like currency, most prominently Facebooks Libra, which has the backing of a large number of name-brand financial institutions.

All this leads up to the newly coined notion of a national digital currency lets have the US government implement it instead of Facebook and its consortium partners!

This is all-too-typical technology mania. Weve seen it many times. The true believers ignore evidence, ignore existing practice and fervently believe in the world-transforming new technology. Loads of highly-paid executives and government leaders pay obeisance, effectively paying insurance against the remote possibility that the cult delivers real value. Theres a strong lemming effect: dont be left behind!

People who advocate for a national digital currency like to ignore the one we already have, in favor of some variation of the currency beloved by human smugglers, drug lords and international illegal arms traffickers. Like the people at the Digital Currency Initiative at the much-revered Media Lab at MIT. In a recent WSJ article, the director of the lab immediately conceded that with direct deposit of salary and Venmo to split the cost of dinner with friends, it seems like we already have a digital currency. But this isnt good enough! After all, there are fees, and big banks are involved and sometimes transactions can take days. Ugh. With a real national digital currency, a federal cryptocurrency, payments would be faster, cheaper and more secure.

There are just a couple little problems. Here are some highlights:

Crypto-groupies love to talk about the slowest transactions in the multi-trillion dollar US digital dollar system. While large parts of the US digital dollar system execute huge numbers of transfers in seconds, Bitcoin takes on average ten minutes to execute a single transfer. And thats only if you pay an above-average fee if you dont pay much, you could wait for hours for your transaction to process.

Depending on the transaction size, Bitcoin can only process between 3 and 7 transactions per second. If there were always transactions waiting to be processed, 24 by 7, at 5 transactions per second Bitcoin could handle at most 158 million transactions per year. By contrast, over 10 billion transactions are performed at just ATM machines every year in the US alone. There were over 110 billion card transactions in the US in 2016. The growth in transactions from 2015 was over 7 billion; the growth in card transactions was about 50 times greater than the maximum capacity of Bitcoin.

Crypto-groupies love to talk about the high fees for doing certain dollar transactions, ignoring the immense transaction flow of cheap and easy transactions like direct deposit and ACH, which operate at huge volumes. They dont talk much about the costs of running cryptocurrency. Theyre smart to ignore the subject. Todays Bitcoin transactions are costly, and the second you try to correct the various problems (speed, scalability, security), the costs skyrocket.

Hardly anyone uses Bitcoin, and the volumes are tiny compared to the dollar. Nonetheless, Bitcoin is incredibly, mind-blowingly expensive to operate. Even at todays minuscule volumes, Bitcoin computer processing consumes about the same amount of electricity as the whole country of Switzerland!

If you lose your checkbook, your credit or bank card or anything else, youre OK; you contact the bank and they fix it. By contrast, if you lose your cryptocurrency key (a string of numbers), there is literally no way to recover your money. About 20% of all Bitcoin are believed to be lost, something like $20 billion!! If you lose your key, whoever gets it can take all your Bitcoin, unlike with for example a lost card, where you call the bank, report the lost card, and avoid losing any money.

The crypto folks love the fact that everyone imagines that crypto means cant be cracked. So they avoid the subject. The fact is, crypto banks are robbed and every Bitcoin stolen all too often. Nearly a million bitcoins have been lost in this way, a loss at todays prices of roughly $10 billion!! Even the core defense of Bitcoin has now been cracked.

To the outside, crypto people are all about ignoring the problems and promoting wonderfulness. Among themselves, the relatively sane advocates recognize the problems and try to solve them, with endless variations being rolled out. In doing so, they either make the problems worse or destroy what little value there is in cryptocurrency. One of the leading ideas is to make a private blockchain, which is a pathetic joke. For example, Microsoft and Intel spell out many problems by way of selling their ineffective solution, and the Facebook Libra coalition takes the solve it by making it worse approach to new lows.

The whiners will whine about whats wrong with todays US dollar. Is it really chock-full of problems, as the crypto-groupies like to say? Lets do something rare: focus on the positive. First and foremost, lets remember that the dollar has worked for a couple centuries now, and along the way transformed itself from physical to about 90% digital, all without breaking! In addition, it has benefited from tremendous private-sector innovation. Here are some highlights of the fastest, cheapest and most secure currency ever created:

Physical cash is great. When Im in the city and someone gets my car for me from the garage, I like to give a tip. Its easy: I pull out my wallet and hand over bills. Anything fully digital would require electronics and would be a pain.

Cards are great. When I pull into a gas station in New Jersey, where gas is pumped for you, I open the window, say fill with regular, please and hand over a card. When its done, I get the card and a receipt and drive off. Easier than cash because no change. This is fully digital. Today. And, at my great local gas station, they often clean my windows, so I get to hand the guy a couple bucks as a tip. Painless.

Cardless is great. I call for an Uber from the app. When the car arrives, we each check each others identities and away we go. On arrival, I get out. Thats it!

Wiring money for a house closing is great. I call USAA, my bank, who verifies my identity and gets it done in minutes. No going to a branch, certified checks, etc. The phone call is a good thing it reduces the chance of fraud to near-zero, unlike the fraud-riven crypto world.

P2P apps are great. There are zero-cost, instant transfer apps like Venmo, CashApp and Zelle. These are used by over a hundred million of people, and they work. Today. How could crypto in any form be better? Actually, it would be worse. See this.

What about those awful transactions that supposedly take days? Yup, there are some. Its called a step-by-step, no errors or crashes permitted transition to real-time. Transactions are already 100% digital, and with ACH (like electronic checks) very low cost. The version of ACH in the UK is already same-day, and ACH in the US is in the middle of a transition to same-day and real-time.

What about international payments? I guess the crypto-groupies are out of touch with whats going on here in the real world. For personal use, credit cards are already accepted nearly everywhere, with everyone involved getting or paying in their own currency. The big complaint of the crypto people is international business transactions, involving lots of time, transfers and fees. That was true. Which is why a handful of amazing new companies have emerged and are addressing the issue. A couple of them are operating at scale and in production today.

Currency Cloud, for example, has a brilliant solution. A company that has suppliers in many countries gets the suppliers to give Currency Cloud their preferred local bank accounts. Currency Cloud itself maintains local accounts for itself in all the countries it supports. The buyer sends a payment directive to Currency Cloud, who then does a local transfer of the requested amount from its account in the target country to the vendor in that country. As the network grows, each supported country has a larger number of companies both sending and receiving payments, so that a growing number of transfers can be done completely locally only the net payment imbalance between countries needs to be settled by Currency Cloud between its own accounts, which it optimizes for minimum cost. This is 100% digital, low cost, real-time, and operating at scale. Today.

For smaller business and individuals there are services exploding onto the scene for international payments. For example, Rapyd (disclosure: my VC fund is an investor) enables people without bank accounts to buy, sell and get paid for work in over 100 countries at over 2 million access points, where they either get or give local currency to complete international digital transactions. For example, you could be a driver for Uber and get paid, even though you have no card or bank account.

Get over it, crypto-fanatics and blockchain groupies. Yes, the Bitcoin technology is an impressive achievement, and highly useful to the criminal class. But it makes any real-world currency problem you can think of worse, and completely ignores the patent reality, which is that the wonderful future of a national digital currency is something we have today the US dollar!

Read more:
Who Needs Cryptocurrency FedCoin When We Already Have A National Digital Currency? - Forbes

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has finally picked one out of the thousands of cryptocurrencies in existance and declared that it is the best. And it's not Bitcoin.

It's Dogecoin.

Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that was invented as a joke by Jackson Palmer and Billy Markusbut it took on a life of its own. With the Japanese dog breed Shiba Inu as its mascot and an entire language built around the coin, "wow, such coin, many profit," it developed a cult following.

It's not the first time Musk has showed his love for Dogecoin. He previously changed his Twitter bio to reflect that he was the CEO of Dogecoin and once tweeted "throw a dogecoin to ur witcher" before deleting it shortly after.

Today, he first tweeted that "Dogs rock," with an image of a dog celebrating its birthday without any concept of numbers. Underneath it he added that dogs "have the best coin."

Musk has spoken about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency too but in peculiar ways. He once tweeted, "Cryptocurrency is my safe word," before later adding that, "Bitcoin is not my safe word."

He has also spoken about Bitcoin too, saying that it could be a replacement for cash in terms of enabling illegal activity. But that he doesn't see it becoming the main method of payment around the world. Perhaps that role is reserved for his favorite cryptocurrency. Wow.

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Elon Musk says Dogecoin is the best cryptocurrency - Decrypt