First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Could Drop in the Short Term

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Bitcoin dropped on Tuesday after experiencing low volatility over the past few days, and traders are expecting the cryptocurrency to fall more in the coming weeks. Ethereum was little changed while Optimism’s OP jumped 5% on the day. According to B2C2, an over-the-counter market maker, BTC has witnessed a preference for buyers in the past weeks and could be set to drop in the short-term. “In recent market observations, bitcoin has shown a noticeable preference for buyers, despite the cryptocurrency’s price hovering within a tight range between $42,000 and $43,500 for much of last week,” said Ed Goh, head of trading at B2C2. “Without any immediate news on the horizon and the ETF launch now fully behind us, one might expect that the short-term range of Bitcoin could be reduced in the coming weeks, especially with Chinese New Year on the horizon.” Crypto Finance AG analyst Matteo Bottacini said due to the lightness of the current macroeconomic landscape, “any potential flash-crash is a favourable buying opportunity, especially a downturn towards the $40K level.”

A New York judge ordered Ripple Labs to produce certain financial statements and information on the institutional sale of XRP tokens at the request of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), court filings from Monday show. The SEC request, made in early January, follows a pivotal judgment in the lawsuit that accuses the crypto firm of selling unregistered securities in the country. Judge Analisa Torres' ruling last July that only Ripple's institutional sales of XRP broke U.S. law was celebrated by the crypto industry as a victory in its efforts to clarify how regulators treat digital assets. Having found Ripple liable for violations before the lawsuit was filed in 2020, the requested documents will aid Torres in determining whether the court should order injunctions or civil penalties for the period since then and, if warranted, decide how much, the SEC said in its request.

Solana suffered a “major outage” on Tuesday, the network’s system status page shows. “Solana Mainnet-Beta is experiencing a performance degradation, block progression is currently halted, core engineers & validators are actively investigating,” said Laine, a Solana validator, in an X post. Blocks seem to have last processed at 09:52 UTC, data from Solana blockchain trackers show. Solana’s SOL token was down just over 4% to $93 over the past 24 hours and dropped 2% after the news surfaced. The halt comes nearly a year after the Solana network went down for almost two days in April 2023.