Bitcoin (BTC) outshined the otherwise volatile alternative cryptocurrencies early Monday as the dollar index crashed to a three-year low on reports that President Donald Trump is exploring ways to remove the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. BTC rose over 2% to $87,200, hitting the highest since April 2, according to data source CoinDesk. The move marked a bullish resolution to the recent consolidation between $83,000 and $87,000. Major alternative cryptocurrencies such as payments-focused XRP, Ethereum's ether and Cardano's ADA rose over 1% each, lagging BTC.

The price action for XRP and bitcoin (BTC) resembles a tightly compressed spring on the verge of uncoiling with a sudden release of energy. That's the message from a key volatility indicator called Bollinger Bandwidth. Bollinger Bands are volatility bands set at plus two and minus two standard deviations above and below the 20-period moving average (SMA) of an asset's market price. The bandwidth measures the space between these bands as a percentage of the 20-day moving average. In the case of XRP, the Bollinger bandwidth has narrowed to its...

Canary Capital is looking to launch an exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking the price of Tron’s native token, TRX, according to a filing. The hedge fund submitted a Form S-1 for the Canary Staked TRX ETF with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday. As the name suggests, the fund — if approved — would stake portions of its holdings. This would be done through third-party providers, with BitGo acting as custodian for the assets. The fund would track TRX’s spot price using CoinDesk Indices calculations. A proposed ticker as...

Bitcoin (BTC) is likely headed for a period of heightened volatility as 170,000 BTC — worth over $14 billion at its current price of $84,500 — have moved from wallets held for three to six months, a cohort often linked to market turning points, CryptoQuant warned in a post. On-chain behavior from this group has historically served as an early signal for major price action, according to the post. Mid-term holders are typically considered to be traders that hold a cryptocurrency for anywhere between three to 12 months. They tend...

HashKey Capital announced what it says is the first investment fund in Asia designed to track the performance of XRP, the digital asset used in Ripple’s global payment infrastructure. The new fund, called the HashKey XRP Tracker Fund, will be open to professional investors and will allow exposure to XRP without the need to manage the asset directly. It will offer the ability to buy through cash and in-kind subscriptions, and offers monthly liquidity. Ripple will be an early backer of the fund. The investment deepens its strategic ties with...

Crypto exchange giant Kraken has laid off hundreds of staffers across all areas of the business over the past several months, as the firm continues to streamline its operations ahead of a potential public listing in the U.S., according to two people familiar with the situation. Kraken was reported to have laid off 400 staff, or about 15% of its workforce, at the end of October last year, when Silicon Valley investor and Kraken board member Arjun Sethi became co-CEO alongside David Ripley, who took the reins when former CEO...

Lombard Finance, a Bitcoin infrastructure developer, has launched a software development kit (SDK) that allows wallets, exchanges, and other platforms to offer one-click bitcoin (BTC) staking. The release aims to further bring BTC into the decentralized finance (DeFi) economy by tapping into the estimated $154 billion in bitcoin estimated to be sitting idle on centralized exchanges. The new toolkit allows users to stake BTC to mint a liquid staking token called LBTC, which can be automatically deposited into Lombard’s DeFi Vault for a current annual yield of 3%, according to...

Wednesday’s price action between bitcoin (BTC) and U.S. equities caught investors’ attention highlighting early signs of a fading correlation between the two. In a typical diversified portfolio, assets are expected to show little to no correlation. For example, gold has continued to hit all-time highs, setting 12 new daily records this year, demonstrating a clear dislocation from U.S. equities. While bitcoin has often been labeled a leveraged play on the Nasdaq 100, recent trend suggest that relationship may be weakening.

Project Eleven, a quantum computing research and advocacy firm, has launched the Q-Day Prize, a global competition offering 1 bitcoin (BTC) to the first team able to break an elliptic curve cryptographic (ECC) key, the cryptography which secures the Bitcoin network, using Shor’s algorithm on a quantum computer. Shor's algorithm is a quantum computing method that efficiently factors large numbers into their prime components, theoretically allowing quantum computers to break cryptographic algorithms like RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography used in Bitcoin and other blockchain networks.