Decentral Block Post

Bitcoin (BTC) returned above $30,000 on April 18 as volatility preceded the day’s Wall Street open.

Bitcoin erases intraday losses

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView followed BTC/USD as the pair suddenly added $500, delivering daily gains of more than 3%.

The pair had previously worried traders, who watched as $30,000 support looked set to remain as longer-term resistance.

Before crossing the $30,000 mark, Binance order book activity was a focus for monitoring resource Material Indicators, which identified bid liquidity moving closer to spot price.

“Some has already started moving closer to the active trading zone. Watching to see if more of it follows or if price drops back into the $28s to fill,” part of accompanying commentary read.

Ethereum blockchain underwent a successful Shapella upgrade on April 12, making way for validators to withdraw their staked Ether (ETH) from the Beacon chain after three years. After seeing over a million ETH in withdrawals in the first week, the amount of staked ETH has now surpassed the number of ETH being withdrawn for the first time after the Shapella upgrade.

Data from the on-chain analytic firm Nansen suggests that there are more ETH being staked at present than withdrawal requests. As of April 17, the ETH staking volume ETH staked 124,000 ETH exceeded the withdrawal volume of 64,800 ETH for the first time. In the last 24 hours, the amount of staked ETH was 94,968 against 27,076 in withdrawals. The first round was mostly partial withdrawals from Lido and old validators. It takes approximately three days to get into the withdrawal queue.

Shapella upgrade was being projected as the make-or-break situation for the Ethereum blockchain as millions in unlocked ETH posed a risk of mass selling of the token. However, contrary to popular belief, the majority of the validators are re-staking their unlocked Ether. Crypto exchange Binance will open withdrawals on April 19.

Related: Ethereum price metrics hint that ETH might not sell off after the Shapella hard fork

Out of the 1 million withdrawn ETH, 3 addresses re-staked ETH with a total of 19,844 ETH. 3 addresses transferred ETH to Centralized exchanges after withdrawal, with a total of 71,444 ETH sent to different exchanges. Other whales did the same with some sending it to Huobi staking address and few other to CEX, according to data shared by Lookonchain.

A four-year-old video of United States Securities an Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Genser giving praise to smart contract platform Algorand (ALGO) is circulating on Twitter following the SEC declaring ALGO is an unregistered security.

In the video, Gensler referred to Algorand as a “great technology” while he was contemplating whether a “high performance” smart contract network would be capable of integrating an Uber or Lyft-like application on its platform.

ALGO is one of six tokens that Gensler claimed was an unregistered security in the SEC’s lawsuit against crypto trading platform Bittrex on April 17 that took issue with the Algorand Foundation's initial coin offering (ICO) of ALGO in June 2019.

Cryptocurrency researcher Mason Versluis was one of the first to highlight the video in an April 17 tweet criticizing Gensler for “shilling” ALGO, with others calling out the SEC chair for his apparent hypocrisy.

Gensler’s praise of Algorand was heard by an audience at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) “Fintech Beyond Crisis” conference held on April 25, 2019.