Bitcoin fell over $100 from the highs after service disruption at a major USD exchange. While BTC/USD is still in an uptrend, the same can’t be said for its little brother Litecoin. But let’s start with BTC and we’ll get back to LTC/USD later on.
Bitcoin Falls $100 Dollars
Bitcoin fell $100 dollars in the past 17 hours alone after the outage of major BTC/USD exchange Bitfinex. Prices on Fxopen were trading around $722 dollars per coin when the whole fiasco started last night. Just 30 minutes ago a low of $623.00 was hit.
Bitfinex migrated its data center recently and according to their twitter account, seems to be experiencing networking issues. This resulted in a long 8 hour outage last night, during which BTC/USD prices crashed over $50 dollars. Only few hours later, trading was halted yet again with BTC prices trading around $713 on that exchange. This caused a second round of selling with prices tumbling to a low of $623 on Fopen and $655 on other exchanges. Bitcoin prices are more stable on Chinese exchanges, fetching a premium of over $25 dollars to their USD counterparts.
On Fxopen we are quoted at $633 dollars right now while on most USD exchanges bitcoins are selling for $670-$675 dollars per coin. Chinese sites are quoting prices close to $700 U.S. dollars. In a previous post we elaborated more on these price differences.
Despite the major selling during the past 17 hours, the uptrend (daily charts and above) is still unbroken. But we are getting close to a potential trend stopper, the $550-$560 dollars area. A clearing of this former congestion area and a decisive break below would end the short-term BTC uptrend. The medium-term and long-term trends for bitcoin are still up as well.
Here are some of the important levels. On the upside, the round $700 dollars level may act as weak resistance. This is followed by a stronger level at $744.39 dollars, the rally high for BTC/USD. Above here we have more resistance at $800, followed by a cluster of resistance levels at $830, $840 and $850 dollars per coin. We end the important levels on the upside with the round figures at $900 and $1000 dollars.
Litecoin Rally Ends
After today’s sharp losses, the Litecoin rally finally ended. In has been in effect for almost two months, after a break above $3.30 dollars back in April. The medium-term is up but the long-term trend is undecided.
A decisive breakdown below $4.15 dollars per coin could start a new LTC downtrend. Support levels below can be found at the round $4 dollars figure, followed by $3.78 dollars. Not far below here we have a support area from $3.50 to $3.61 dollars. A break below here could lead to more losses toward $3.30 and eventually the round $3 dollars figure.
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