- Bitcoin survives dip with low of only USD 6,095
- US stockmarkets have been much more volatile than Bitcoin in recent weeks
- WHO has partnered with the MiPasa blockchain alliance to fight coronavirus
Bitcoin failed in its attempt to breach USD 7,000 yesterday, despite staying strong above USD 6,200 for several days and even marking higher lows a couple of days in a row. As we maintained yesterday, it would all rely on the last bits of Friday trading in North America that, unfortunately, did not go as the bulls had planned.
The most positive note to take from this, however, is that the best efforts from bears barely took them close to USD 6,000 and the low of USD 6,095 (CoinDesk) shows that strong support is holding for the time being.
It is definitely a wild and crazy week but the term crazy seems to get wider and wider in definition these days, especially with the American stock markets, who have lately been even more volatile than Bitcoin. We look at the S&P 500, where the average volatility of daily returns for the past 30-day period, or historical volatility has smashed 200%, which is almost ten times the average volatility of 27% witnessed in the preceding 12 months. The data comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis and it calculates the standard deviation of the daily gain or loss from each of the past 30 trading days. This is typically then used to express an annual terms number regardless of the actual time frame.
Compare this to Bitcoin’s volatility gauge in the same period, which was at a “mere” 138%. Of course, over the previous 12 months period, Bitcoin wins, with a 65% average volatility.
The data doesn’t, of course, mean much in terms of price prediction, since it only measures how far it deviates from the mean. In other words, Bitcoin has had smaller than average deviations in that period compared to the S&P 500 in the last month.
All this has likely been brought along by worsening coronavirus fears outside of China, which then made global downturn fears deepen. Persistent sell-off in stocks triggered margin calls, just as they did in crypto markets, when investors sought more liquidity in troubled times. Today, a 5% price moves in the stockmarket is as normal as it has been for us in the crypto space.
Meanwhile, could blockchain help number the days for coronavirus? The World Health Organization (WHO) certainly hopes so. It has now announced a partnership with several big tech and blockchain firms to launch the MiPasa platform. It will be using distributed ledger technology (DLT) to share data related to the spreading global pandemic. Built on the Hyperledger Fabric platform, it hopes to help with “early detection of COVID-19 carriers and infection hotspots”.
Tech firm IBM and Oracle, along with enterprise blockchain platform Hacera and IT corporation Microsoft are among the key partners of this new blockchain initiative that seeks to help build information-sharing bridges that are fully private between individuals, government authorities and health institutions.
The project’s website summarizes:
“MiPasa can help monitor and foresee local and global epidemiological trends and detect likely asymptomatic carriers by feeding big data on infection routes and occurrences to powerful AI processors around the world.”
Significantly, many national health institutions are also including their contributions to MiPasa. Among those names are the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention from China, UK and the US, the Hong Kong Department of Health, the Government of Canada and China’s National Health Commission.
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