- Bitcoin punctures USD 7,000 on Monday trading and looks to be staying above it
- PwC says that Asia and Europe will be the new hunting grounds for future fundraising efforts
- Despite a lack of interference, Bitcoin fundamentals are recovering
Bitcoin has carried over the momentum from the weekend, starting Monday strong by puncturing the USD 7,000 resistance for the third time in the last seven days. This time, however, it has been a steady accent and it has not yet been rejected, now about USD 7,100 (CoinDesk) for the past six hours and climbing.
The key now will be to wait a few more hours for North American markets to wake up and see if the bulls are of similar thinking, or if the bears will continue to sell to take quick profit. The way it looks now, though, will give a lot of hope to the optimists that the good times are coming back, especially now as Bitcoin futures at Chicago Mercantile Exchange broke its record last week and is poised to make even more after trading USD 347 million worth of futures contracts last Thursday.
Speaking of North America, a fresh report by one of the Big Four accounting firms, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) says that the crypto fundraising trends are now shifting to Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA) and the Asia Pacific countries. Its 2nd Global Crypto M&A and Fundraising Report details how last year, crypto fundraising declined by about 18%, while funding involved during mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the industry lost 40% year on year.
But when zooming in, the regional trends changed drastically, with Asia Pacific funding along with that of EMEA clocking in a 51% of combined fundraising and M&A numbers, up from 44% from the year before. In the Americas, this figure reversed to 48% from 55% in 2018.
And this year would see that trend deepen, says PwC:
“2019 saw APAC and EMEA play a bigger role in the global crypto M&A and fundraising space. We expect to see this trend to continue in 2020. In particular, we expect to see more activity from APAC and EMEA based family offices looking at the market turbulence as a good time to enter the market.”
Overall, the firm also says that the crypto industry continued a phase of maturation in 2019 as funds began to move to companies also progressing to latter stages. It points out that 71% of funds raised in 2018 were for seeding stages, while the same stage only received 59% of funding in 2019. It adds:
“Consolidation in the crypto ecosystem continued in 2019 with almost half of the M&A activity in the sector being driven by existing crypto market participants looking to expanding the range of services they offer.”
Whatever the outcome this year, analysts right now are looking at the growth and markets of crypto and one thing can be agreed upon: even without bailouts or stimulus packages, Bitcoin does seem to be doing quite well on its own as recovery looks to be on the cards.
In fact, other fundamentals have also begun to pick up, with the huge difficulty drop that was experienced in March now recovering, with a 10% difficulty gain since 21 March, according to data from blockchain monitor Blockchain. Of course, this was to be expected when Bitcoin difficulty crashed after miners left the network when price became unprofitable for them to continue operating. But once it became easier to mine Bitcoin, more miners entered the fray, adding to a rise in hash power as more rigs hooked up to the network.
A couple weeks ago, Bitcoin's hashrate began to fall rapidly.
So what did Bitcoin do?
It automatically lowered mining difficulty, miners increased their mining capacity, and now Bitcoin's hashrate is storming back towards new all-time highs.
No bailouts required ? pic.twitter.com/VARHJ0NxWe
— Shakepay — Buy Bitcoin ?? (@shakepay) April 3, 2020
8 April should see the next difficult adjustment, but data still suggests that the hash rate will continue upwards, giving Bitcoin remarkable powers of healing. Canadian crypto exchange Shakepay simply summed it up: “No bailouts required.”
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