Neutrino

WAVES price crashes 50% in one week — watch these support levels next

April 7, 2022 Coin Telegraph

The latest brutal selloff in WAVES leaves it below a key support level and at risk for more downside.

Waves (WAVES) lost around half its value in April so far and risks further correction due to weakening technical and fundamental factors.

WAVES price risks another 30% decline

WAVES dropped from nearly $64 on March 31 to around $27.50 on April 7 — down by over 55%. As it fell, the WAVES/USD pair also broke below a key support confluence, hinting further correction.

Notably, the confluence comprises WAVES' 50-day exponential moving average (50-day EMA; the red wave) and the 61.8% Fib line of the Fibonacci retracement graph — drawn from $64-swing high to $8.34-swing low.

Now broken, they suggest that WAVES' path of least resistance is to the downside, with $25 acting as interim support due to its historical relevance as a price floor in October 2021 and March 2022.

*WAVES/USD daily price chart. Source: TradingView*

Additionally, WAVES' daily relative strength index (RSI) also shows room for a further decline, being only 11 points away from slipping below the "oversold" threshold of 30.

Meanwhile, breaking below $25 would risk crashing WAVES' price to its 200-day simple moving average (200-day SMA; the orange wave) near $20, coinciding with the 0.786 Fib line, about 30% lower than today's price.

The bearish setup emerged amid allegations that equaled the Waves Platform with a "Ponzi," namely a Twitter thread penned by 0xHamZ, who accused Waves' team of artificially inflating the price by more than 650% from February to March.

Meanwhile, Neutrino USD, a "stablecoin" backed by WAVES reserves, also lost its U.S. dollar peg following 0xHamZ's accusations, further dampening market sentiment.

Jolyon Horsfall, the co-CEO of NFT prediction platform SparkWorld, noted that the Waves Platform founder, Sasha Ivanov, "will need to step up if the token is to be revived and the project re-aligned on its ambitious path." He warned:

"For the time being, the dumping is expected to continue, and the WAVES price may fall to its 30-day low of $21."

Bull flag retest?

However, WAVES shows some signs of defying bearish predictions while keeping its long-term uptrend intact.

Notably, the ongoing correction brings WAVES closer to testing another double-layered support zone, defined by its 20-week EMA (the green wave) and the upper trendline of its previous "bull flag" setup, as shown in the chart below.

*WAVES/USD weekly price chart. Source: TradingView*

A bounce from this weekly support confluence could see WAVES rally to test its "bull flag" target near $70.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

Nearly $13.75M liquidated as WAVES rallies 70% in a day — what’s next?

March 29, 2022 Coin Telegraph

<div>Nearly .75M liquidated as WAVES rallies 70% in a day — what's next?</div>

Altcoin

Stablecoin management DeFi platform Neutrino emerges as the key factor behind WAVES' ongoing price rally.

WAVES price surged by up to 70% on March 29, reaching a new all-time high around $54. Traders betting against the rise of Waves — the native token of the WAVES blockchain network — suffered losses worth millions of dollars as the WAVES/USD pair extended its recovery to a record level in the past 24 hours.

The price rebound, which started on Feb. 22 when WAVES price was at $8.25 caused around $13.75 million worth of liquidations due to crypto-based futures on a 24-hour adjusted timeframe, data from Coinglass shows.

*WAVES liquidations every 12-hours. Source: Coinglass*

Around $11 million of the total liquidated positions were short.

2.0 hype, Neutrino behind WAVES rally

As Cointelegraph earlier covered, traders may have jumped into the WAVES market after assessing its three consecutive optimistic updates: the migration to Waves 2.0, the launch of a $150 million fund, and partnership with Allbridge.

Edson Ayllon, product manager at dHEDGE — a decentralized asset management platform, told Cointelegraph that the euphoria surrounding the release of Waves 2.0 in October was reflective in the rising total value locked (TVL) in the Waves ecosystem that reached an all-time high of $4.36 billion on March 29.

"Waves 2.0 adds EVM support to the execution layer, and adds Proof-of-Stake with sharding to the consensus layer," the analyst noted, adding:

"Sharding and Proof of Stake have been concepts Ethereum has been working towards for years on their roadmap."

Interestingly, Neutrino, an algorithmic price-stable "assetization" protocol built atop the Waves blockchain, appeared largely behind the increasing Waves TVL.

Notably, the protocol witnessed an inflow of 8.91 million WAVES in one day — worth nearly $450 million — to its smart contract, data from Defi Llama shows.

*Waves inflow into the Neutrino smart contract. Source: Defi Llama*

Neutrino allows the creation of decentralized stablecoins that maintain their U.S. dollar-peg by collateralizing WAVES tokens. The protocol has launched just one stablecoin project so far, called Neutrino USD (USDN).

The supply of USDN increased from around 800 million to 832 million on a 24-hour adjusted timeframe, coinciding with the rise in the WAVES inflow into the Neutrino smart contract. That presented Neutrino as one of the active WAVES buyers in the past 24 hours.

*USDN market capitalization in the last 24 hours. Source: CoinMarketCap*

What's next?

WAVES appears to have been breaking out of a bullish continuation pattern called a "bull flag."

In detail, the chart pattern looks like a downward sloping channel that appears after a strong price move upward (called "flagpole"). In a perfect scenario, it resolves by breaking out toward the level at a length potentially equal to the flagpole's size.

Applying the classic interpretation of the bull flag pattern to WAVES' ongoing price action suggests a continued price rally toward $100, as shown in the chart below.

*WAVES/USD weekly price chart featuring 'bull flag' pattern. Source: TradingView*

However, WAVES' weekly relative strength index (RSI) has turned overbought — a sell signal. That could have the WAVES/USD pair retrace towards $34 as its interim support level. That would also mean that traders are returning to bull flag's top for another upside confirmation.

As a result, a continued selloff below $17 would risk invalidating the entire flag setup.

Waves price rises 230% in just three weeks — Could a ‘triple top’ spoil the rally?

March 10, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Altcoin

Neutrino was buying the WAVES dip as the price rebounds to the best level in over four months.

Waves (WAVES) continued its price rally further into this week, even as its top crypto rivals wobbled between losses and gains elsewhere in the market.

A 230% Waves boom

The WAVES/USD trading pair surged by nearly 75% this week to reach around $31, its best level since Oct. 28, 2021. Its rally came as a part of an upside retracement move that saw it rising by a little over 230% in three weeks.

In contrast, Waves' top rival in the smart contracts sector, Ethereum, underperformed, with its native token Ether (ETH) dropping by almost 2% in the last three weeks. Similarly, Bitcoin (BTC), the leading cryptocurrency by market capitalization, underperformed in the same period, rising by a little over 1%.

Neutrino buys the Waves dip

As Cointelegraph covered earlier, Waves' price rally might have surfaced in the wake of back-to-back optimistic updates, including the launch of a $150 million fund to support Waves-based decentralized application projects and the partnership with Allbridge to facilitate interoperability between Waves and other blockchains.

In addition, the period of Waves' uptrend also coincided with an increase in its inflow to Neutrino's smart contract. Notably, the supply of Waves tokens into the algorithmic stablecoin protocol increased from 43.38 million on Feb. 15 to as high as 51.80 million on March 8.

*The total number of Waves tokens in Neutrino smart contract as of March 10, 2022. Source: Defi Llama*

As of March 10, Neutrino held about 47.31 million Waves tokens in its smart contract, with the total value locked coming out to be worth $1.35 billion, almost 60% of the total value locked inside the Waves ecosystem.

Notably, Neutrino enables the creation of multiple decentralized stablecoins that maintain their U.S. dollar-peg by collateralizing Waves stored in Neutrino's official smart contracts. The first such stablecoin is Neutrino USD (NUSD).

Over the past 30 days, Neutrino issued more than $135 million worth of NUSD, backed by reserves that surged from around $530 million to — as mentioned above — $1.35 billion. Meanwhile, an increasing amount of Waves tokens supplied into Neutrino's smart contracts underscored that it was one of the most active Waves buyers since Feb. 10.

*NUSD market capitalization in the past 30 days. Source: CoinMarketCap*

As Waves' price boomed, Neutrino appeared to have kept the tokens in its "reserves fund" to provide backing to NUSD in the event of the next price drop, thus limiting its downside bias.

'Triple top' setup

Technically, Waves may be sketching out a triple top against the U.S. dollar as its price comes closer to testing its all-time high near $42 for the third time since May 2021.

*WAVES/USD weekly price chart featuring triple top. Source: TradingView*

In detail, triple tops form when the price form three peaks with pullback moves towards a so-called "swing low" in between. First, they show that markets cannot penetrate the peak areas, i.e., they cannot find new buyers near/at the top level. Later, the price falls back to the swing low.

As a result, if Waves fail to close above its first and second top, its likelihood to drop towards the swing-low area between $11 and $13 — the range that has been supporting the three peaks — will be high.

Coinbase signs new $1.36M contract with US Customs enforcement agency

September 20, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Coinbase signs new .36M contract with US Customs enforcement agency

Analytics

Coinbase has inked its second deal to develop software for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency since August.

Leading U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has secured a contract to develop tech for the Department of Homeland Security worth as much as $1.36 million.

Under the agreement, Coinbase has been contracted to deliver “application development software as a service” for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement division (ICE).

The contract took effect on Sept. 16 and will see Coinbase receive $455,000 from the department. However, the contract could be extended to last for up to three years in total, which would see Coinbase receive up to roughly $1.36 million.

The deal is the second partnership inked between Coinbase and ICE, with the exchange having secured a $30,000 contract to provide “computer forensics services” to the agency in August.

The news has received backlash from the crypto community, with Human Rights Foundation chief strategy officer Alex Gladstein asserting the compensation is relatively low given the scale of Coinbase’s operations and the reputation risk posed to the exchange by the partnership:

“This isn’t very much money for Coinbase in the grand scheme of things. Strange that they would risk much reputationally such a relatively small sum.”

The news has also resurrected criticisms concerning Coinbase’s 2019 acquisition of blockchain analytics startup, Neutrino.

During the year of the acquisition, it was reported that the people behind Neutrino had previously been part of Hacking Team — a company revealed to have helped authoritarian regimes to spy on journalists.

Neutrino CEO, Giancarlo Russo, was the ex-COO of Hacking Team while its CTO, Alberto Ornaghi, was at the company for more than 8 years. According to the Washington Post, the Italian company was implicated in the murder of a number of journalists in the Middle East between 2013 and 2018.

In March 2019, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said that Neutrino staff with prior connections to controversial firm Hacking Team would transition out of their new roles at the exchange.

Responding to Coinbase’s new contract with ICE, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell, tweeted:

“Even more bizarre is the acquisition they made and reputational hit they took to be able to offer this service to the government.”

Since its acquisition of Neutrino, Coinbase has also inked contracts with the U.S. Secret Service — which announced the creation of a Cyber Fraud Task Force in July 2020. The task force has been mandated to investigate the use of cryptocurrency for criminal purposes, stating later that year:

“Cryptocurrency presents a troubling new opportunity for individuals and rogue states to avoid international sanctions and to undermine traditional financial markets, thereby harming the interests of the United States and its allies.”

Coinbase is currently embroiled in a regulatory tussle with the Securities Exchange Commission, with the regulator taking umbrage with its planned stablecoin lending product and threatening to take the company to court.