Decentral Block Post

A freshly unsealed indictment has charged five individuals with “conspiring to manipulate the market” in relation to an alleged scheme involving the ERC-20 Hydro (HYDRO) token.

An April 24 statement from the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) said the indictment charged three people for conspiring to manipulate the market for Hydro. Two other individuals were separately charged for their roles in the scheme.

The DOJ alleges that from June 2018 through April 2019, Michael Ross Kane, the former CEO of Hydrogen Technology Corp., Shane Hampton, Hydrogen’s chief of financial engineering and George Wolvaardt defrauded market participants looking to trade the Hydro tokens Hydrogen issued.

According to the indictment, Wolvaardt, who was the chief technology officer for a market-making firm called Moonwalkers Trading Limited designed a trading bot that executed a number of high-value “spoof orders” at obscure intervals to make it appear as though there was high demand for the token. The bot also bought and sold large volumes of the token from the same account — a practice known as wash trading.

Following the alleged artificial manipulation of the price of Hydro, the DOJ claims the co-conspirators sold large chunks of their holdings netting an approximate total of $2 million in ill-gotten profits.

Chainlink’s (LINK) low-latency oracles will integrate with the decentralized exchange (DEX) GMX following a successful governance proposal that sought to provide more “granular” real-time market data to GMX v2.

Voting ended on April 25 at 12:00 am UTC with over 96% of participating GMX token holders voting in favor of the proposal.

The new Chainlink oracles — which were built with the input of GMX core contributors — were brought in to improve upon the functionality of perpetual DEXs and price-sensitive trading on GMX, the author of the proposal explained.

In addition, the low-latency oracles are said to strengthen security, further decentralize the protocol and improve upon the user experience, Johann Eid, the head of integration at Chainlink Labs said.

While these new oracles utilize the same oracle node operators and data aggregation mechanisms used in existing Chainlink reference feeds, Eid explained that the new oracles extract data at a “higher frequency.”

Bitcoin (BTC) managed to stay above $27,000 for the past three days but its 9% loss last week spooked some newbie traders. Glassnode data shows that short-term holders, who acquired Bitcoin less than 155 days ago, have been moving coins to the exchanges at a loss since April 16. 

While short-term traders are panicking and focusing on the $25,000 level on the downside, some analysts are turning bullish for the next year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jamie Douglas Coutts expects Bitcoin to reach $50,000 by April 2024.

Another bullish voice was that of Standard Chartered analyst Geoff Kendrick who said that the “crypto winter” may be over. He projected that Bitcoin could skyrocket to $100,000 by end-2024.

What are the important support levels where the latest leg of the correction may attract buyers? Let’s study the charts of Bitcoin and altcoins to find out.

S&P 500 index price analysis

The S&P 500 index (SPX) has pulled back to the 20-day exponential moving average (4,098), indicating that the bears are selling the rallies near 4,200.