Hi, I'm Molly Jane, managing editor here at Cointelegraph, and I'm talking to Mati Greenspan this week about bitcoin's price Hey, Mati, so bitcoin's price right now is trading between about $7,500 and $8,100
What's going on there and any sort of trend that you can see? Yeah, so at the moment we're consolidating gains, right We have had a huge year so far So from the lows in mid-December several ramps already, February was a notable one, early April and then that massive one in mid-May That one in mid-May has actually happened over several days which was a really good sign, like some people are waiting for a Bart Simpson pattern right where we see those huge surge and then the consolidation and a huge surge back, huge plunge When you have that type of sustained rally that's much less likely to happen, and what we're seeing now is a consolidation pattern up at the top, so basically, after you have that type of surge it's very normal to get a little bit of a pullback or, at the moment, it's basically cementing in people's minds – this is what the price is right now
So we're trading in a range at the moment from around $7,500 to $9,000 Of course there is that notable resistance point, right in the middle, which is around $8,100, but the big one is $9,000 If we go past $9,000, if we get a big break out of $9,000, that's very likely to cause more FOMO and obviously on the downside if we get a break below that $7,500, but there's a lot of support here too, so $7,000 is a support, $6,400 which was the great stabilization range you'll remember from last year, $6,000 is a support, $5,000 is a very heavy support So that's more or less where we're at, at the moment So now kind of going on to the news cycle, the Facebook Coin news, the fact they have one hundred people working on it, the fact that the white paper is supposed to come out June 18th
Do you think that that's going to be influencing the market or is that something that has already influenced the market and if so, is the price indicating that influence? So the thing about the Facebook Coin is that we don't know very much about it right now All we really know is that Facebook has put one of their top players David Marcus in charge of a blockchain division and that they're hiring like crazy, at last count it was estimated that they have about 50 employees working on their blockchain section After that what we get are a lot of leaks, right So we had an article in The New York Times, we had an article in Bloomberg, and the latest one here is from TechCrunch which was just last week And when you get these type of leaks, they always say sources say, they are not saying who is telling us what's going on, but we can trust that, because these are big name news sites, they verified their source
So the best thing that we can indicate is or the best guess that we have at the moment of what's going on, is that Facebook is making some sort of a stablecoin which is going to be pegged to the price of several different fiat currencies for stabilization so they don't want just peg it to the US dollar, but actually a basket of different currencies And it's going to be integrated with WhatsApp, Facebook, probably Instagram or a holistic integration throughout the Facebook So this is similar to what Tencent has done in China, where they have WeChat, WeChat Pay and stuff like that
So Facebook is looking, very likely looking to do something like that Now, question that we all want to know, is this good for bitcoin, is it good for the crypto industry? And I actually ran a poll on my Twitter account which is just closing within the next half an hour, about the time this video is published it'll be closed already Facebook Coin is blank for the crypto industry 55% indicated that it's good for the industry And then 10% other, 35% said it's bad
So overall, what it looks like is people feel that this is going to be a big on-ramp for crypto whereas people are going to realize that the Facebook Coin is some sort of a centralized version, but people are hoping that it's going to be easier to convert Facebook Coin into bitcoin and vice versa, so that it will just basically open up the on-ramps As far as my personal opinion, this is a tweet that I send out Facebook Coin isn't a competitor to bitcoin, it's a competitor to the US dollar I don't know if you agree with that statement, not agree with that statement up to you, but I feel that this is more or less where we stand at the moment
All right, so with that news may be coming out this summer, and I mean just other news, price surges, price falls, what do you expect to happen this summer, do you see any sort of price cycle coming up? Yes, so the price cycle is very much in line with what we've been saying all along, right So we had that, you know, here's the summer, right, let's say from September till end of 2018 and then we had fall, right, until February a very short fall, and then crypto winter which was a prolonged winter this year And then the capitulation phase So, at the moment, we are very much in the spring So this is where we're at
And, personally, I think that people should really enjoy from the spring Summer is very hot, people get burned I don't know if you remember what happened to bitcoin and some of the crypto industry during last summer, there were a lot of websites that just couldn't handle the traffic Some exchanges basically just said: okay, we're not accepting new customers at this time, because there was just so much, the Bitcoin blockchain itself got really clogged, transaction fees spike, transaction times were out of control So let's not try and look forward to summer at the moment, we're in spring, let's just enjoy the spring
My last question has to do with Litecoin which is up a lot, 7% today Can you speak about the reasons as to that? Oh yeah, definitely So Litecoin, we're going to be seeing a halving in Litecoin, as we know that means that every new block is going to see half the rewards, and this is basically influencing the supply, so we're going to be seeing half of the new supply coming, so inflation basically goes in half Litecoin has been seeing also, as far as the price is concerned, I believe that Litecoin is really what kicked off the current bull run that we're seeing, so since the mid-December lows Litecoin has been one of the best performers, second only to really Binance coin as far as the large cap altcoins And it's not seeing a consolidation, just yesterday we saw a new fresh yearly high
Very nice trajectory in Litecoin, as far as the technicals are concerned What's more important, what people are missing I believe, is that yes, we have the halving event coming up, but Litecoin's fundamentals are extremely strong If you think about what gives a crypto its value, a lot of that is derived from the network effect So how many people are actually participating in the network and how many people are using it This is something that I feel on social media all the time, because every time I write anything about Litecoin I always get very positive responses and everybody's always extremely happy about it
But if you want to look at the numbers you can actually see this is the number of transactions that happen on the Litecoin blockchain So there's the obvious spike right, in quick crypto summer, last crypto summer January 2018 But what you'll notice here, and this is something that's incredible, is that the transaction level never really came back down to previous levels It just had this great stabilization at around 20,000 transactions per day What that told me at the time was that we've basically created a floor on the transaction level of Litecoin which created a floor for the entire crypto market and basically held it up showing that yes, there is actual usage going on, even when there was apathy in the crypto market capitulation, people wanted to puke from their crypto holdings, because they got so wrecked, and Litecoin we're still seeing those 20,000 transactions per day which was much greater than anything that it ever seen before that
And then, of course, we can also look at the hash rate of Litecoin which has been on the rise lately, no kidding, look at that – all-time highs right now And just for comparison, we can overlay Ethereum on top of that, so Litecoin is the blue line, Ethereum is the red line Take a look at that, Litecoin is one of the most secure crypto networks, I believe second only to Bitcoin So if you're familiar with crypto 51 app which shows how secure each blockchain is by how much hash rate is available to be rented, Bitcoin obviously zero, you cannot NiceHash Bitcoin, Litecoin's at 3% which is less than Ethereum The only other one is BitcoinCashABC which has also seen other stability issues according to BitMex research
So Litecoin has two of those primary factors that contribute to valuation which is the network effect and the security of the networks, I believe this is very likely the reason why it's been outperforming lately That was my last question, so thank you so much for speaking with us today Right on, anytime, it's a pleasure, Molly So that was me, Molly Jane, speaking with Mati Greenspan And remember, this is the month of movie premieres for Cointelegraph
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