There have been predictions and chatter about the future of Bitcoin (BTC) as the end of summer rolls by. Historically, September has been a weak month for the crypto space with most of the assets witnessing massive price reductions.
The latest development around bitcoin is that a bitcoin whale address has been activated for the first time in nine years and transferred 5,000 bitcoins worth $100 million to the crypto exchange Kraken. Colin Wu, a popular crypto reporter, cited data from OKLink and wrote,
“The Bitcoin whale address (18xGHNrU26w6HSCEL8DD5o1whfiDaYgp6i ) transferred out 5000.01 BTC at 04:50:38 (UTC+8) on September 5th to the Kraken, which is worth about $100m now. The wallet was created and bitcoins were transferred to this address in 2013.”
After the release of the US unemployment report last week, bitcoin remained under pressure. Bitcoin is trading below $20,000 for the ninth day in a row, barely managing to hold above $19,511. This price point also peaked in December 2017 and could continue to act as an important support for BTC going forward.
On Sunday, September 4, Gavekal Research published a report which stated:
“The Fed is busy ‘burning’ money as well (a.k.a. quantitative tightening) to restore the credibility of the US dollar. That presents a significant headwind for all cryptocurrencies.”
bitcoin lightning network
Last week, the capacity of the Bitcoin Lightning Network touched an all-time high of around 5,000 BTC. The network is a layer-2 scalability solution for the bitcoin network that makes transactions faster and cheaper.
Interestingly, Michal Saylor’s MicroStrategy has been working to bring on board a greater number of users to the Lightning Network. On Saturday, September 3, Saylor spoke at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia. He called this network “the most important thing going on in the world of technology.”
Sailor also added, “There are a few R&D projects going on at Microstrategy right now where we’re working on Lightning’s enterprise applications: Enterprise Lightning Wallet, Enterprise Lightning Server, Enterprise Authentication.”
He informed the audience that this step would enable companies to “roll out Lightning to a hundred thousand employees every day”. It would also be possible to open 10 million Lightning wallets overnight, he mentioned.
How has the crypto summer treated bitcoin?
The crypto summer is generally defined as the period from the beginning of June to the end of August. Bitcoin’s last two monthly candles were almost identical, with the only difference, of course, being the color—July’s was green and August’s was red.
In July, Bitcoin experienced a volatile trade.
It was initially around $19.9K, hit a monthly low of around $18.8K, peaked at around $24.7K, and closed around $23.3K.
August was no relief- Bitcoin started at around $23.3K in August, sank to $19.6K, climbed as high as $25.2K, and ended the month around $20.0K.
However, the whole summer was not so terrible—June went relatively well. Bitcoin started the month trading around $31.8K.
