Decentral Block Post

The $900 million Bitcoin (BTC) weekly options expiry on May 12 might play a decisive role in determining whether the price will succumb below $27,000.

Bitcoin price rejected again at $30,000

BTC bears will try to take advantage of macroeconomic headwinds, Silk Road coins' FUD, and uncertainty caused by Bitcoin’s transaction fee spike to pull Bitcoin's price down in the next few days.

The BTC/USD pair  broke above $29,800 on May 6, but the tide quickly changed as the resistance proved stronger than anticipated.

The subsequent 8.2% two-day correction tested  $27,400 support, favoring the thesis of sideways trading as investors evaluate the economic crisis dynamic and its potential impact on cryptocurrencies.

Meanwhile, Berkshire Hathaway owner and billionaire investor Warren Buffett is no longer optimistic about the U.S. economy’s growth. Such a pessimistic scenario for the global economy might explain why some Bitcoin traders decided to reduce exposure over the past week, greatly reducing the odds of breaking $30,000.

Bitcoin (BTC) struggled to recover from fresh losses on May 11 as a false alarm over United States government sales spooked markets.

Analysts deny U.S. government BTC sales

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD circling $27,400 at the time of writing.

The pair had seen a flash sell-off the day prior, briefly taking it to $26,850 after claims that confiscated BTC held by the U.S. government was being sold off.

This was subsequently disproved, but for already sensitive crypto markets, the damage was done.

Among traders, Jackis described the local lows as a “scam” move, while forecasting lower levels to come.

An email sent out to Coinbase customers describing memecoin Pepe (PEPE) as a “hate symbol” co-opted by alt-right groups has drawn significant ire from the memecoin community. 

Prominent crypto influencer Borovik.eth shared a screenshot of the email newsletter from May 10 to his 96,000 followers, which cites a 2016 decision from the Anti-Defamation League to place the frog-themed character in its database of online hate symbols.

Fans and holders of the frog-themed memecoin were outraged at the description of the token, sparking calls for Coinbase to issue an apology, and users to start deleting their accounts with the crypto exchange.

Pseudonymous Twitter user and solidity developer @Kenobi declared that Pepe is not a symbol of hate and that he would be moving funds to the US-based crypto exchange Gemini as a result, completing his tweet with the hashtag: “#deletecoinbase”

The hashtag “#deletecoinbase” has hit the trending bar of Twitter, with more than 14,000 tweets in the last 2 hours and counting, according to data from Tweetbinder.

The market cap of new memecoin Pepe (PEPE) has fallen $1.1 billion from its May 6 peak, though on-chain data shows it's still being bought by some crypto whales. 

Over the last five days, the price of the memecoin has plummeted more than 56% falling from a peak of $0.00000431 to $0.00000193, according to CoinGecko.

The downward price action of Pepe has seen the token’s total valuation sinking from a peak of $1.82 billion on May 6 to $820 million at the time of publication.

A May 8 report penned by researchers from crypto fintech firm Matrixport attributed Pepe’s sharp decline in price to traders selling large chunks of their holdings to new retail investors following the memecoin’s listing on Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by daily trading volume.

Additionally, the report found that the largest driver of Pepe’s meteoric price action since its inception on April 14, seems to be coming from traders based in Asia. According to Matrixport, buying activity during Asian trading hours contributed a staggering 3,657% to the total 9,071% rally witnessed by the memecoin as of May 8.