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Mastercard
On the 25th of August, the Mastercard CEO, Michael Miebach, revealed on his personal LinkedIn profile that the company is working with Binance to enable purchases with cryptocurrencies in more than 90 million stores.
Although Mastercard has been actively exploring the crypto space for a while integration with the world’s leading crypto exchange is still big news for the crypto space.
Mastercard will also introduce a cashback feature. For certain purchases, cardholders can earn up to 8% in crypto cashback.
Binance will provide cardholders with a proper interface to manage their cryptocurrency, cards, and transaction history.
VISA also made the news due to an Argentinian crypto firm by the name of Ripio launching a pre-paid VISA crypto card in Brazil.
The card allows users to pay in any of 28 different cryptocurrencies and receive 5% Bitcoin cashback rewards on all purchases.
The Bitcoin cashback rewards are to be released in October and have a cap of $50 per month, per user.
Ripio is looking to issue about 250,000 of the new cards hoping many millions of Brazillian citizens will adopt the new card.
The company also plans to launch the card in Argentina later this year. With more plans to potentially expand the crypto card in other countries such as Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay.
On the 22th of August Samsung Securities announced they are looking into launching their very own cryptocurrency platform according to South Korean news sources.
Samsung Securities works as an affiliate of the Samsung technology group.
The news seems more than likely to go through as the president of El Salvador, President Bukele, also met with Samsung’s President of Consumer Electronics recently.
On top of this Samsung Securities was the first to launch a global blockchain exchange-traded fund (ETF) in Asia back in June 2022.
Market participants have eagerly awaited Powell’s comments since the beginning of this week.
Powell's comments often have a grandiose effect on the market movements as they did again on the 26th of August.
Powell's comments were very reserved and made many investors turn back on their risk-on plays, resulting in a sharp drop across assets.
Jerome Powell warned against prematurely loosening policy, forecasting further strength rate hikes to come, he stated that "history cautions against 'prematurely' loosening policy".
He further confirmed this later in his speech by stating that the markets "will likely require a restrictive policy for some time".
For the time being it seems as though the risk-off attitude in the markets remains the most secure option for investors.
Summary
With large buyers such as Blackrock partnering with Coinbase, payment networks such as Mastercard and VISA creating global crypto payment cards, and Samsung looking to create their own crypto exchange, the institutional adoption is by no means negligible.
Although the price action seems admittedly wonky, the institutional adoption has not wavered.
It's abundantly clear that big investors and massive corporations want a stake in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin currently sits at the bottom of the previously mentioned bear flag.
A breakdown seems imminent but has not yet occurred.
A minor breakdown of the bear flag occurred on the 26th of August after the stock market saw a quick spike down after the speech Chairman Jerome Powell gave, which will be covered at length later in this newsletter.
Not only is bitcoin breaking down its high time frame flag, but it has formed a smaller flag on lower timeframes which is also breaking down (See Fig. 1).
Too sum it up, it really doesn't look to good here for Bitcoin.
We can all use a fresh perspective on the state of Bitcoin's current market.
Therefore, let’s compare it to the 2018 bear market.
During the 2018 bear market it took 176 days to rally above the 6k long-term support and resistance (Fig. 2).
The current long-term support and resistance sit at 30k (See Fig.3),
If the market takes just as long to break above it’s previous long-term support and resistance, the rally above 30k would not occur until early into November of this year.
The other good news is the percentage drop since the break of key levels. In the 2018 bear market, we dropped about 48% from key levels. So far in this bear market we've already dropped about 40%, if this parallel holds true, it could mean there's not much pain left.
Another 8% would put BTC at 15500. Unfortunately, there is not much support to be found at the 15500 level. The only real support is the consolidation that happened during the highs of the 2017 bull market.
The 15500 level does not seem too bad of an area to accumulate just a bit more Bitcoin.
The Nasdaq seems to have found some footing at the $185 level for small consolidation (Fig. 4).
Although no real confidence has yet been shown by the bulls, the footing may still hold.
On Friday the 26th of August Jerome Powell had a speech at Jackson Hole, in which he revealed an extreme sense of hawkishness about the current financial markets.
Through the revealed caution of Powell the markets saw a stark drop, with the Nasdaq forming a long red candle of 2%~.
The drawback points of 172 and 155 seem still to be in play and are not particularly unlikely.
The Nasdaq has a lot of space to form a new higher low at either of the indicated levels, after which continuation to the upside remains possible.
