- Bitcoin continues a week of positive sentiment across the market
- Ripple makes waves in Thailand as remittance industry gets instant payment boost
- Bitcoin long-term holders unperturbed by recent events, with safe haven premises intact
Bitcoin price has continued in its relatively stable yet steady ascent over the past 24 hours, and it would appear the positive sentiment is still intact among the majority of Bitcoin traders and analysts, even after the pre-weekend slide that condemned Bitcoin’s attempt to overcome USD 7,000 to break support.
Not buying the trend line = self abuse.
Bottom is in.
See you all @ $7600.$BTC #bitcoin pic.twitter.com/E4krowwbJB
— Slim Trady – non giver of ICP (@TradySlim) April 10, 2020
The technicals show stronger signs of a positive trend as well, and as we covered in yesterday’s analysis, Glassnode data suggests a bottom already.
Some bullish news from the weekend comes from Thailand, a country that the World Bank says is one of the top remittance destinations in the world, with the kingdom receiving up to USD 6.7 billion in remittances annually from millions of Thai workers doing employment overseas. However, it is also one of the costliest countries to conduct such transactions, and citizens there have been losing a lot to fees, while speeds are far from instant.
But now, Ripple technology could bring costs and speed down, as digital money transfer service Azimo announced a partnership the country’s oldest bank, Siam Commercial Bank (SCB). Together, they have launched an instant cross-border payments service from Europe to Thailand that will use Ripple’s global payments network, RippleNet.
Azimo stated:
“The high cost and slow cross-border payments experience today leaves remitters with few options—providing an opportunity for global financial institutions to build differentiated value propositions in this market and deliver an improved customer service experience.”
Azimo’s blog announcement states that the solution will seek to solve the challenges of costly and unreliable international payments and claim that remittances will complete in under 60 seconds when sent from Europe to Thailand, far better than the current fastest single business day settlement. Remittances from the United Kingdom are even more impressive, with near instant settlement.
Azimo co-founder and CEO Michael Kent noted that many countries have already onboarded the platform saying:
“Thailand recently launched their instant payment network, and this partnership with the largest bank in the country allows us to get the time to settle payments down from around 24 hours to an average of 22 seconds. [It’s] faster to send money to Thailand than to someone else in Europe.”
It won’t only be altcoins expecting good stuff to come in the future, as CoinDesk’s Galen Moore in the media publication’s Quarterly Review talks about how the Bitcoin safe haven narrative has changed after the Black Thursday event on 12 March, the defining event of 2020 so far, made investors rethink Bitcoin’s viability as digital gold.
We’ve written in the past that the narrative still stands, but that Bitcoin was never really the hedge against global catastrophes, as regular people will liquidate to pay for bills and food, but Moore suggests that since even traditional assets crashed on the same day, even assets confirmed as safe havens aren’t safe in those black swan situations. He writes:
“Now, we’ve seen an economic crisis cause dislocation in crypto markets and push bitcoin’s price downward in tandem with stocks. Gold and Treasury bonds appeared to have failed to live up to “safe haven” expectations. If gold’s narrative is being debated, do we still know what “digital gold” means? At the very least, the events of the past month have put to rest the notion that bitcoin today can be a “haven”.”
Moore points out that long term holdings have also not moved, suggesting that holders have not changed their mindset and future outlook for the world’s most-used cryptocurrency. When tracking time stamps that measure how long each bitcoin has been held, a sustained period of “buy-and-hold” activity continues to be observed. He adds:
“That activity is consistent with bitcoin’s use case as “digital gold,” a putative store-of-value. Note that long-term holdings (180 days or more) did not change perceptibly during the March 12 crash. Balances held between 90 days and 180 days shifted abruptly. Were bitcoin sellers concentrated among three- to six-month holders? Or were exchange balances, which shifted on these dates, concentrated in that band?”
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