Bitcoin and cryptocurrency markets are holding steady but could be poised for a bigger move ahead.
Crypto twitter is awash with updates on vote counts from various U.S. states as the numbers are updated live. At the time of press, the count was 223 to 212 in favor of Joe Biden according to the Guardian’s live election tracker, but there is a long way to go yet. In terms of electoral college votes, the two are evenly matched.
The results on the tracker above are reported by the Associated Press. Interestingly, the AP ‘call’ is verified by Ethereum using a Chainlink oracle so anyone tapping into the official AP results can verify the accuracy using the blockchain data.
The big names in the crypto community are pretty evenly split in their loyalties, and Ethereum prediction markets have been a popular way to make a wager on the outcome.
Bitcoin is holding steady at the moment which is unsurprising since everyone’s attention is focused elsewhere. According to Tradingview, BTC pushed back to $14,070 a few hours ago but has since retreated again back below it to trade at $13,800 at the time of writing.
All losses from yesterday’s market dump have been recovered and the asset has hit its second-highest price for the year so things seem to be bullish on that front.
The rest of the markets are mixed with Ethereum holding at $385 and the majority of altcoins showing little change over the past few hours as trading takes a back seat to politics.
A win for Donald Trump would signal confidence in the stock markets and since crypto has been largely correlated to them in recent months, could induce a push higher.
That said, Trump tweeted that he was ‘not a fan’ of Bitcoin in July 2019, a month after Facebook unveiled the Libra project. However, the current POTUS has nominated a number of federal regulators relevant to the crypto industry, including SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, and CFTC Chairman Heath Tarbert.
Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has not commented on cryptocurrencies during his campaigning though the campaign did joke that it was not accepting Bitcoin following the 2020 twitter hack. A shaky stock market, should Biden win the White House, could result in a short term flow into safe haven assets such as gold.
The article was first published on: Nov 4, 2020