Decentral Block Post

Bitcoin (BTC) is keeping everyone on their toes when it comes to price trajectory — where will it go next?

BTC price down 10% after bad week 

After a week in which BTC/USD fell by 10%, sentiment is getting a reset and traders are eyeing key support levels closer to $25,000.

At the same time, consensus is far from unanimous over market health — some believe that the next phase of upside is around the corner.

As macro markets gear up for a new period of crucial data and moves from the United States Federal Reserve, volatility catalysts are waiting in the wings, with Bitcoin potentially not staying calm for long.

Cointelegraph takes a look at the upcoming scenarios that could cause BTC/USD to quit its short-term sideways trading pattern.

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.”