Bitcoin trading range narrowed last week as the upper and lower bounds of the range moved significantly lower and higher respectively from the previous week’s positions. The price is below $26,850 currently, below the middle of two Fibonacci levels. The RSI moved down toward the lower bound of the neutral zone. The price is in consolidation mode trading sideways as neither bears nor bulls seem able to gain upper hand in vying for market control.
Stocks traded higher last week despite several Federal Reserve officials indicating they expect interest rates to stay high. And Fed chair Powell said on Friday US interest rates might not need to rise as much given the tighter credit conditions from the banking crisis. Meanwhile French officials welcome US crypto firms fleeing uncertainty as US lawmakers work on formalizing official stance on crypto currencies, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s bill on cryptocurrencies gets criticized as a veiled attempt to ban crypto and South Korea probes crypto exchanges on ex-lawmaker's transfers.
Financial Markets Authority officials in France expect more US to register in the country as they flee uncertain legal environment in US. France already boasts around 74 registered crypto companies and expects that number could surge to 100 as the EU’s Markets in Crypto Assets rules were formally signed off by ministers last Tuesday.
A former senior spokesperson at the US Department of the Treasury covering digital assets, fintech, climate finance, financial stability, domestic finance and economic policy wrote that the Warren-Marshall bill which was first introduced in 2022 and may soon be introduced in this new Congress, must be defeated. The bill treats software developers and transaction validators as financial institutions and requires they register as financial institutions. The expert claims requiring software developers and validators to engage in the same kind of multi-million dollar compliance regime that banks do would collapse the crypto economy, which, after all, is the point.
South Korean prosecutors searched accounts at major exchanges Upbit and Bithumb, relating to the transfers made by a former lawmaker. The lawmaker faces accusations that he was trading coins during meetings of the National Assembly's judiciary committee in May and November last year and presented himself as a frugal politician while owning 800,000 WEMIX tokens, worth $4.5 million between January and February 2022.
