Bitcoin pops early morning but upside looks limited

Story by: AARON HANKIN

Cryptocurrency prices scored a fillip higher early Monday as overall market sentiment begun the week on an uptrend.

Notably, the price of the No. 1 digital currency, bitcoin BTCUSD, +6.46% jumped by as much as $900 Monday, trading to an intraday high of $10,323.50, before trading back to $10,235.17, up 6.77%.

Despite the gains, bitcoin and other digital currencies continue to face headwinds, registering losses on four of the five U.S. trading sessions last week. “We see no change in the fundamentals for bitcoin,” Naeem Aslam, chief Market Analyst at ThinkCoin said.

“It [this mornings move] seems to be a technical move but we still favor lower highs as opposed to higher lows.”

Aslam added technical resistance remains at the $11,350 – $12,000 level.

Even as cryptocurrency prices struggle to make significant gains, industry experts are hailing the falling transaction fees as a reason for optimism.

“Decreasing transaction fees are very significant and a huge benefit to anyone sending funds on the bitcoin network (making commerce much cheaper and more efficient),” Alex Sunnarborg, Founding Partner of Tetras Capital said.

“The declining fees can be attributed to new exchanges and services implementing SegWit (increasing block capacity for transactions) and transaction batching (combining multiple transactions into one).”

BitInfoCharts

The average price to transact a bitcoin is at its lowest level in over a year, currently at $2.73, according to BitInfoCharts.

Elsewhere, ether, which runs on the Ethereum network, was up 3.8% at $877.91, bitcoin cash last traded at $1,267.14, up 8.1%, Litecoin us up 3.3% to $227.17, and Ripple was up 2.4% at $0.96, according to news and research CoinDesk.

Futures markets have opened in the green. The Cboe Global Market’s March contractXBTH8, +3.02% is up 3% at $10,200 and the CME Group Inc. March contractBTCH8, +2.61%   is up 2.8% at $10,160.

Original story: https://tinyurl.com/ydyylrwo

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