Decentral Block Post

Bitcoin (BTC) headed toward the upper end of its trading range on June 24 as optimism crept back into traders’ forecasts.

Bitcoin price "ready for $23,000"

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView tracked a broadly stable BTC/USD as it hit local highs of $21,425 on Bitstamp.

The pair had shifted higher since wicking below the $20,000 on June 22, with United States equities similarly cool going into the weekend.

“Bitcoin ready for $23,000,” Cointelegraph contributor Michaël van de Poppe announced to Twitter followers on the day.

At just above the crucial 200-week moving average (WMA), $23,000 formed a popular upside target for commentators — and sellers.

Bitcoin (BTC) headed toward the upper end of its trading range on June 24 as optimism crept back into traders’ forecasts.

Bitcoin price "ready for $23,000"

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView tracked a broadly stable BTC/USD as it hit local highs of $21,425 on Bitstamp.

The pair had shifted higher since wicking below the $20,000 on June 22, with United States equities similarly cool going into the weekend.

“Bitcoin ready for $23,000,” Cointelegraph contributor Michaël van de Poppe announced to Twitter followers on the day.

At just above the crucial 200-week moving average (WMA), $23,000 formed a popular upside target for commentators — and sellers.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDC) do not pose any direct threat to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) but are still associated with risks in relation to stablecoins, one industry executive believes.

According to Mikkel Morch, executive director at the digital asset hedge fund ARK36, a state-backed digital currency like the U.S. dollar doesn’t necessarily have to be a competitor to a private or a decentralized cryptocurrency.

That’s because the use cases and value proposition of the decentralized digital assets “often go beyond the realm of simple transactions,” Morch said in a statement to Cointelegraph on Thursday.

The exec referred to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell who earlier this year hinted that the United States government would not stop a “well regulated, privately issued stablecoin” from coexisting with a potential Fed digital dollar.

As such, active commitment to the CBDC development does not mean that other countries like Singapore are unfriendly to non-state-backed cryptocurrencies, Morch said. The executive suggested that a CBDC roll-out may even “facilitate the proliferation of non-sovereign cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies.”

Bitcoin (BTC) miners may have already sparked a “capitulation event,” fresh analysis has concluded.

In an update on June 24, Julio Moreno, senior analyst at on-chain data firm CryptoQuant, hinted that the BTC price bottom could now be due.

BTC price bottom “typically” follows miner capitulation

Miners have seen a dramatic change in circumstances since March 2020, going from unprecedented profitability to seeing their margins squeezed.

The dip to $17,600 — 70% below November’s all-time highs for BTC/USD — has hit some players hard, data now shows, with miner wallets sending large amounts of coins to exchanges.

This, CryptoQuant suggests, precedes the final stages of the Bitcoin sell-off more broadly in line with historical precedent.

XRP's ongoing upside retracement risks exhaustion as its price tests a resistance level with a history of triggering a 65% price crash.

XRP price rebounds 30%

 XRP's price gained nearly 30%, rising to $0.36 on June 24, four days after rebounding from $0.28, its lowest level since January 2021.

The token's retracement rally could extend to $0.41 next, according to its "cup-and-handle" pattern shown in the chart below.

Interestingly, the indicator's profit target is the same as XRP's 50-day exponential moving average (50-day EMA; the red wave).

Major resistance hurdle

The cup-and-handle bullish reversal setup tends to meet its profit target at a 61% success rate, according to veteran analyst Thomas Bulkowski. 

The Horizon Bridge to the Harmony One layer-1 blockchain has been exploited for $100 million in altcoins which are being swapped for Ether (ETH).

The hack may vindicate previously raised community concerns about the robustness of the two of four multisig that reportedly secures the bridge.

Starting at about 7:08 am until 7:26 am ET, 11 transactions were made from the bridge for various tokens. They have since begun sending tokens to a different wallet to swap for ETH on the Uniswap decentralized exchange (DEX), then sending the ETH back to the original wallet.

So far, Frax (FRAX), Wrapped Ether (WETH). Aave (AAVE), Sushi (SUSHI), Frax Share (FXS), AAG (AAG), Binance USD (BUSD). Dai (DAI), Tether (USDT), Wrapped BTC (WBTC), and USD Coin (USDC) have been stolen from the bridge through this exploit.

The Horizon Bridge facilitates token transfers between Harmony and the Ethereum network, Binance Chain and Bitcoin. Harmony, the operator of the bridge, announced late on June 23 that the bridge has been halted. It said the BTC bridge and its assets have not been affected by the attack.