The founders of the cryptocurrency trading platform Gemini, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, have recently launched a mobile Bitcoin and crypto trading app together with a new investment vehicle, as their official blog post published on December 11th noted. This headline makes it in the latest cryptocurrency news in regards to new trading platforms. The post outlines that the new mobile trading app will allow users to buy and sell crypto while monitoring real-time and historical crypto market prices for Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) as well as ZCash (ZEC). The users can see the total value of their current portfolio and set price and percentage value change alerts for their chosen coins. The further functionalities will include a "recurring buy" feature as well as extended support for a newly-launched investment vehicle that is named "The Cryptoverse" and is described as a basket of cryptocurrencies, weighted by market capitalization in order to be bought as a single order. As the interview with Bloomberg published yesterday noted, the twins struck a bullish tone in regard to the recent market crash. Tyler stated that "we are totally at home in winter" and his twin Cameron added that "it gives us time to build internally, and refine and kind of catch our breath.” Cameron even described the app as a bid to reach out to retail investors, stating:

“A lot of our decisions have perhaps given off a perception that we’re more institutional-based. The reality of the situation is that we have a diverse customer base. And the retail story is just beginning.”

The twins and Gemini founders also revealed their plans to expand to the Asian crypto market where they will face stiff competition from the thriving exchange industry that includes companies such as Bitfinex, Binance and Huobi.  

In the latest Bitcoin news, we are sharing something positive about the leading cryptocurrency by market cap. According to data from CoinMarketCap, it seems like Bitcoin has grown its dominance rate and is now (even more) dominant at 55.14% in the entire crypto market. The next four high volume cryptocurrencies following Bitcoin include Ripple (XRP) with 11.14%, Ethereum (ETH) with 8.55%, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) with 1.65% and Litecoin (LTC) with 1.33%. As the data from the past weeks and months shows, investors have been quite afraid to keep their holdings in altcoins which is why many of them chose to dump them and retreat them into the relative safety of Bitcoin. Currently, the total cryptocurrency market cap hovers around $109 billion, which is a figure that represents more than a 86% drop from the all-time high of $825 billion in January this year. As the end of the year approaches and a number of optimistic predictions about a crypto market look increasingly wide of the mark, a lot of investors may likely have decided to prepare for the so-called "crypto winter" - and decided to convert their holdings to Bitcoin - whether to hold or prepare them for cashing out into fiat. Currently, a few notable crypto investors including Andreas Antonoupoloulos and Jim Breyer continue to stress that even though the market is continuing to take pain at the moment, it doesn't mean that cryptocurrencies are undergoing a fundamental unraveling as an asset class (at least not yet).

In our latest Bitcoin news, we find out what is going in with the mining industry and why are miners turning off their devices. A few weeks ago, the BTC network difficulty dropped by 15 percent and this is considered the second largest drop since 2011 not taking into consideration that one time that bitcoin difficulty dropped by 7 percent which was a hard hit over the past six years. Some of the crypto analysts believe that this is a sign of bitcoin going on a full death march but despite these believes, the current situation does show how the downturn has influenced the miners by raising the mining costs and lowering the profits immensely. According to a research done by the BitMEX exchange, the BTC hash rate has already declined by more than 30 percent since November started and that more than 1.3 million mining devices especially Antminer9, have been turned off completely. The recent sell-off has blown a punch to miners more than it has influenced investors. The overall bitcoin mining revenue declined to $6 million per day just as December started. The total bitcoin mining revenue in November was $13 million which shows the worrying situation miners are in. One of the reasons for this may be the network difficulty adjusting as pre-set intervals rather than adjusting in real time. For this reason, the hash rate drop will lower down the number of blocks until a new difficulty adjustment happens. The BitMEX report notes:

 “In the six-day period ending 3rd December, 21.8% fewer blocks than the expected 144 per day were found, as miners left the network before the difficulty adjusted, and as a result, fewer blocks were found. Therefore in the short term, there was a 21.8% fall in mining incentives on top of the impact of the declining price.”

So the conclusion would be that all of the crypto miners are operating at a loss right now, but this should not have a strong impact on Bitcoin itself.

In the past 24 hours, the crypto news show that Bitcoin and Ethereum have fallen by more than three percent against the US dollar - in a new crackdown that saw the cryptocurrency market losing $4 billions in valuation - falling by just about 3.5%. While the major cryptocurrencies struggled to demonstrate signs of a potential corrective rally, some small market cap altcoins and ERC-20 tokens managed to plunge by more than 10% on average. The Ethereum price has been experiencing a similar trend as Bitcoin as its price fell by about the same magnitude as BTC with a drop in its daily volume. Several traders have also called a bottom for Bitcoin this week, seeing the strong recovery from the $3,000 lows with the support level intact. As one of the analysts with a handle "Hsaka" said:

“Rejected by previous support. Seems to be forming a descending channel on the LTFs (aka a way to visualize a downtrend). I often use channels for confluence with horizontal levels (both the rejections from the black horizontals were also at the channel boundary).”

When it comes to the short-term trend of ETH, another analyst named Edward Morra raised the possibility of ETH dropping to $55 and said:

“If ETH bulls lose this support and low set at $83, it is basically vacuum till next meaningful support around $55 – $45, another 35% downside from here.”

If Ethereum drops by another 35%, tokens will definitely bleed out and continue to lose their value from the already low price range, which could eventually lead some to lose all of their value in the short-term.