Dnata Taps IBM for
Air Cargo Blockchain Pilot

Dnata, provider of air and travel services in the Middle East,

has announced the completion of a proof-of-concept examining blockchain's potential in the Dubai air cargo industry. The pilot saw participation from project partners IBM, Emirates Innovation Lab and Flydubai Cargo, and looked at blockchain's potential to address issues across various aspects of airfreight, including security and operations, as well as legal aspects, a press release indicates.

The "successful" trial was conducted on a jointly developed logistics platform, utilizing blockchain for supply chain transactions, taking a purchase order from the origin to the final destination. Stating that blockchain technology and its potential is neither easy to understand or appreciate, Neetan Chopra, senior vice president for IT strategic services at

Emirates Group, said:

"It is imperative to carry out such business experiments and trials so that participants can experience the benefits of breakthrough technologies in a live environment."

The move follows the release of white paper by air transport IT firm SITA, detailing the use of smart contracts in the air transport industry. While, Air France is also testing blockchain technology for supply chain tracking.

Holding Strong:

Failed Price Breakdown a Boon
for Bitcoin Bulls?

Bitcoin has witnessed decent two-way business in the last 24 hours.

A drop below $8,000 during the Asian day was quickly undone and the world's largest cryptocurrency by market value once again approached record highs, hitting $8,333 this morning. At press time, bitcoin is changing hands at $8,228, according to CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index. As per CoinMarketCap, the bitcoin-U.S. dollar (BTC/USD) exchange rate has appreciated by 1.13 percent in the last 24 hours. Meanwhile, the total trading volume in the last 24 hours was $5 billion, the highest since Nov. 16. The price action analysis indicates the failed breakdown below $8,000 may be costly for the bears.

The chart would show:

• Failed breakdown: BTC witnessed a solid rebound from the upward sloping 50-MA and is back in the rising channel.
• The relative strength index (RSI) holds above 50.00 (bullish territory).

• The descending trend line seen on the chart above has been breached as well, suggesting there is scope for a rally.

The charts suggest a rally to new all-time highs around $8,600 (rising channel ceiling) is possible. The 10-day moving average (MA) is sloping upwards, suggesting dips below the same could be short-lived. Currently, the 10-day MA stands at $7,949 levels.

However, multiple 4-hour closes below $7,9

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A New Debit Card Is Poised to Make Spending Crypto a Breeze

Spendable Crypto

Cryptocurrencies such as ether and bitcoin are surging in popularity thanks to their many benefits over traditional currencies, but they still lag behind those currencies in one key way: they are not easy to spend in physical stores. People can spend USD and euros using a plethora of debit, credit, and gift cards, but their options are severely limited when it comes to spending bitcoin or ether using a cryptocurrency debit card. That’s starting to change, though. The Centra Card can be used just like a debit card to spend bitcoin, ether, dash, and several other popular cryptocurrencies. Token Card is another cryptocurrency debit card, and soon, London startup London Block Exchange (LBX) will launch a prepaid Visa debit card that will act in the same fashion.

The Dragoncard will allow people to convert their bitcoin, ether, ripple, litecoin, and monero to sterling (aka the British pound) at the time of purchase, thereby making it significantly easier for those currencies to be spent in stores throughout the United Kingdom, including ones that have yet to accept alternative forms of payment. Business Insider reports the cryptocurrency debit card will be issued by pre-paid card provider Wavecrest, and it comes alongside an app people can use to buy and manage cryptocurrencies on LBX’s own exchange. When someone uses the Dragoncard, LBX will pay the retailer in pounds first, then take the equivalent amount from the shopper’s cryptocurrency wallet.

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The Path to Acceptance

Despite the fees, the Dragoncard and other cryptocurrency debit cards have the potential to help crypto become widely accepted and, more importantly, understood. The Dragoncard also arrives at a time when bitcoin is experiencing quite a growth spurt. With schools, companies, and even nations starting to embrace bitcoin, the currency is poised to continue increasing in value and popularity, and with the Dragoncard, LBX is hoping to help Londoners join that ever-growing segment of crypto supporters.

“Despite being the financial capital of the world, London is a difficult place for investors to enter and trade in the cryptocurrency market,” LBX founder and CEO Benjamin Dives reportedly said in a statement. “We’ll bring it into the mainstream by removing the barriers to access, and by helping people understand and have confidence in what we believe is the future of money.” “We’re offering a grown up and robust experience for those who wish to safely and easily understand and invest in digital currencies,” said LBX’s executive chairman Adam Bryant. “We’re confident we’ll transform this market in the U.K. and will become the leading cryptocurrency and blockchain consultancy for institutional investors and consumers alike.”

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Australian Government Grants $8 Million for Blockchain Energy Pilot

The Australian government has announced that it will provide

over AU$8 million (around US$6 million) in grants for a blockchain-powered smart utilities project. The funding will see a grant of AU$2.57 million go directly to the project, which will be set up in the City of Fremantle. A futher AU$5.68 million will be provided via project partners including blockchain firm Power Ledger.

According to the company's blog, the pilot has been set up to explore how cities can use blockchain technology and data analytics to power distributed energy and water systems. The trial is being conducted with academic and technology partners, including Curtin University, Murdoch University, LandCorp, CSIRO and Cisco. Curtin University is to oversee project management and carry out research supporting the trial.

According Curtin's Prof. Greg Morrison:

"We will develop a smart metering, battery storage and blockchain trading system to allow energy and water efficiencies between critical dispersed infrastructures that would otherwise have required physical co-location."

Power Ledger, the post states, is providing a transactional platform for renewable assets, as well as the ownership model for the "precinct sized" battery.

Image via Power Ledger

The federal grants are being provided as part of the government's Smart Cities and Suburbs Program, with support also coming from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), Western Power, and the CRC for Low Carbon Living. The pilot is expected to commence within two months, and will last for two years, the post states.

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Blockchain Has Potential in
Curbing Odometer Fraud:
EU Report

The European Parliament has released a research paper

that explores blockchain, among other technologies, in the prevention of odometer tampering. he report, issued by the Directorate General for Internal Policies, investigates the possible role of blockchain technology in the use case, concluding that it might "present interesting potentials" for effective prevention of fraud through increased transparency and data privacy.

The report explains:

"The blockchain technology currently proposed by the car engineering and electronics industry would allow downloading mileage and GPS data from vehicles, and securing it on a 'digital logbook'."

The study further suggests that blockchain can be supported by a "connected cars" concept that allows cloud access to all relevant vehicle data in a future scenario involving autonomous vehicles. Blockchain technology is one among the three approaches identified to address odometer fraud in the paper, including a standardized framework based on international standards (ISO) and equipping a vehicle with hardware security modules (HSMs) to protect data. The issue of odometer fraud, or "clocking," is one being investigated by other startups in the blockchain space, as well as major enterprises.

In June, CoinDesk reported on a project by startup BigchainDB and German energy company Innogy that aims to create digital identities for vehicles on a blockchain. To tackle clocking, the CarPass project creates a record of the odometer and vehicle activity with the data visible and verifiable on a digital platform. "If someone starts tampering with the mileage, you basically see it as a step change in the data that someone tampered with [it]," said Innogy's Carsten Stocker at the time.

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The Next Frontier in Blockchain Technology:
Scaling and Commercial Optimization

Every successful startup at one point or another faces a turning point

in its history. This turning point, whether a challenge, conflict, or opportunity, oftentimes becomes the defining moment for the startup’s leadership team. How will they respond? What steps need to be taken? What is the game plan to get from point A to point B? These questions are vital, and investors and board members demand answers. Blockchain technology, though not a startup in the traditional sense, is at its turning point. Prices are at or near all time highs, trading volumes are soaring, and the number of cryptocurrency users is growing at a tremendous rate. But these statistics don’t tell the full story.

With cryptocurrency prices rising and transaction volumes hitting peaks, the Achilles’ heel of Blockchains, scalability, is back with a vengeance. The problem essentially boils down to block size–blocks that are too big are automatically rejected by the network. As a result, transactions per second are limited to single digit numbers, or double digit numbers if the Blockchain is really fast. The problem is that this pales in comparison with traditional payment methods like Visa cards. If cryptocurrencies want to compete in the transaction world in a substantive way, something needs to be done.

Sensing this need, some companies are working on customizable operating systems that will establish commercial-scale platforms. The goal is to meet growing business demand through Blockchain technology, as well as provide a central hub for all Blockchains. The hope is that platform operating systems will lay groundwork for the development of new, scalable applications, and organizations like EOS, Grid, DASH, and Waves are aiming to do just that.

How Blockchain operating systems can address the scalability problem

By creating a multi-chain parallel processing infrastructure that fulfills certain requirements, companies could pave the way for greater Blockchain commercialization. The operating systems they are working on are comprised of a main chain and an indefinite number of side chains, allowing a platform to fulfil multiple goals while reducing data redundancy.

The architecture of the operating systems establishes a well organized “Central Business District.” In this business district each industry has its own dedicated side chain–a one to one scenario where specific issues and problems receive direct attention via the corresponding chain. The highly customizable platforms consist of one main chain, or kernel, that forms the minimum viable Blockchain. As the backbone of the operating system this main chain is used as the core from which custom operating systems can be developed. Developers can use the operating system to create specific configurations, providing adaptability that has so far eluded certain Blockchain projects.

So how does this all impact scalability? In essence, a Blockchain-based operating system creates different streams (side chains) which handle very specific tasks. As a result, the main chain isn’t bogged down by having to process transactions it isn’t built to handle. The abundance of chains means that the platform can process independent transactions at one time.

The operating system creates a scenario similar to adding four additional lanes on a one way highway. Drivers can accomplish the same end goal, arriving at their destination, but take a variety of lanes to get there. Traffic bottlenecks are less likely on a five lane highway than a one line highway In the same way, a Blockchain can accomplish its goal but take a variety of chains to do so. Side chains enable the main chain to operate as intended while also getting specialized tasks done.

Blockchain solutions for everyday life

The end goal for Blockchain-powered operating systems is to provide real world commercial solutions. In order to cope with increased transaction volumes, Blockchain companies are building infrastructures that allow companies to create scalable platforms. By allowing a Blockchain to have connected yet independent side chains, companies will find that they can create customizable solutions to meet their business demands.

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Tezos, a cryptocurrency that raised $232 million in July, is in crisis

One of the biggest cryptocurrency crowdsales
hasn’t lived up to the hype.

Tezos, a blockchain technology project that made headlines

in July by raising $232 million, has been hit with its second class-action lawsuit in less than a month. It's the latest blow for the project's founders, husband-and-wife team Arthur and Kathleen Breitman. The Breitmans promised to build a blockchain with a revolutionary new governance model that would avoid the kind of strife that has plagued the Bitcoin world over the last few years. Instead, Tezos itself has been engulfed in controversy since its fundraiser ended. The couple is locked in a bitter conflict with Johann Gevers, the man they picked to lead the Tezos Foundation.

The big question hanging over the Tezos project is whether its so-called initial coin offering violated US securities laws. Those laws require companies to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) before they can offer securities to the public. The lawsuits argue that, legally speaking, the Tezos crowdfunding campaign was a sale of securities, and so the Breitmans broke the law by ignoring SEC rules. Of course, there would have been little reason to file lawsuits if the Tezos project were a smashing success. But the launch of the Tezos network is now months overdue. Anxious investors are starting to wonder if anything will come of their investment.

Tezos sold tokens on a network that didn’t exist

The Tezos project has lofty goals. In a 2014 white paper, Tezos founder Arthur Breitman argued that Bitcoin had a poor governance model. The network depends on everyone following the same set of rules, and those rules aren't easy to change—a problem that has become increasingly obvious over the last three years. Breitman wanted to solve this problem by developing a blockchain protocol capable of modifying its own rules. The Tezos protocol has multiple layers, with a low-level "network shell" providing generic blockchain functionality but leaving most of the important decisions to higher levels of the stack.

Tezos is supposed to have built-in mechanisms for modifying the rules of these higher-level functions. A Tezos user can propose a modification to the rules, which can be accepted or rejected by other users. In theory, this should make the network much more flexible than conventional blockchain networks. The big problem is that the Tezos network doesn't exist yet. People who bought into the July presale were buying the right to receive units of the Tezos currency once the network became operational.

And the lawsuits charge that the Breitmans misled investors about how long that would be. In a May blog post, Arthur Breitman wrote that "all of the functionality described in the whitepaper has been implemented to this date, except for gas metering." The big remaining tasks, he said, were "finishing a security addition," "optimizing smart-contract storage," and "testing our network on a large scale and performing external security audits."

In his May post, Breitman predicted the Tezos network would be up and running "in a three- to four-month period." He said it might take as long as six months to finish, though he added that "Based on my assessment of the remaining development that does not seem likely, but it's not impossible."

That was written almost six months ago. The Breitmans now say that they expect to launch the network next February, and they acknowledge that it could take even longer. The Tezos organization itself has been plagued with infighting. The Breitmans chose to conduct their fundraising through the Tezos Foundation, a non-profit entity that they helped to set up in Switzerland. (As Kathleen Breitman put it, Switzerland has "a regulatory authority that had a sufficient amount of oversight but not like anything too crazy.")

Legally speaking, a Swiss non-profit organization is supposed to be independent from commercial interests, so the Breitmans tapped Gevers, a Swiss engineer, to run the Tezos Foundation. Meanwhile, the Breitmans have no formal role in the foundation's management, but they've been able to exert plenty of informal pressure. Gevers says the couple hasn't relinquished control over the group's tezos.ch domain name. The Breitmans have accused Gevers of self-dealing and have attempted to oust him in a boardroom coup. They've encouraged other board members to re-organize the foundation and delegate key functions to a subsidiary that would be under the Breitmans' control.

But Gevers is having none of it. He insists that he has an obligation to maintain the foundation's independence and safeguard the hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency entrusted to him by Tezos users. (We've asked both Breitmans and the Tezos Foundation for comment and will update if we hear back.) For now, investors' money—which has swelled in value as the value of bitcoin and ether has continued to rise—is managed by the foundation. The plan is for the foundation to acquire the Breitmans' for-profit company after the company develops and launches the Tezos network. Only then will users get their allocations of Tezos cryptocurrency—something that might not happen for months, even after the network is officially launched.

Tezos claimed investments were really donations

People who bought into the Tezos presale were buying the right to acquire Tezos currency in the future, once the network became operational. Plaintiffs say this is evidence that the pre-sale was really a stock offering, little different from a corporate IPO. US law requires anyone who offers stock to the public to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Breitmans didn't do that.

Instead, they tried to skirt those requirements by describing investors' purchases as donations to the Tezos Foundation. But the lawsuit argues that this was a sham. Even the Breitmans themselves didn't really seem to believe it. "What we're going to do is allow as many people who want to buy into the crowdsale over a two-week period," Kathleen Breitman told Reuters in May. When Reuters asked Tim Draper, one of the biggest early investors in Tezos, how much he "donated" in the fundraiser, he responded, "You mean how much I bought? A lot."

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is charged with enforcing securities laws. So far, the agency has enforced the rules with a light hand. In July, days after the Tezos fundraiser had ended, the SEC ruled that a 2015 fundraising effort called the DAO had violated securities laws. But the SEC decided not to press charges in that case, merely warning that future crowdsales could get their organizers in legal hot water. But disgruntled Tezos investors aren't waiting for the SEC to crack down on Tezos. They're filing their own lawsuits based on the project's alleged violation of securities laws. Both lawsuits against Tezos point to SEC statements warning that unregistered ICOs could run afoul of securities laws.

"If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck," this week's lawsuit argues.

The stakes are high for the Breitmans. If they lose the lawsuit, they could be forced to return the money they raised in the crowdsale, and they could face further action from the Securities and Exchange Commission. But the case could also have broader significance for the cryptocurrency world. Tezos was one of the most successful coin offerings conducted in 2017, but there have been many others like it. Most of them have not registered with the SEC, and others have offered the public tokens on networks that haven't been created yet.

If the courts decide that Tezos violated securities laws, it could put many of this year's other ICOs in legal jeopardy. The SEC hasn't begun prosecuting anyone in the cryptocurrency world for violating securities laws, but it could start doing that at any time. And a court ruling against Tezos could put pressure on the SEC to act.

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I'm Really Into Blockchain.
I Blockchain Everything!

In this opinion piece, part of a weekly series of columns, Casey grapples with the inconsistencies of language in the world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and tries to find a way to live with it all.

You can measure how long someone has been into cryptocurrencies
by how they use the word "blockchain."

My initiation came in the fall of 2013, when there was only one cryptocurrency worth talking about, which meant there was really only one blockchain. So, for me, the word had to come with the definite article: the blockchain. This was about a year and a half before "blockchain" became a generic reference carrying an indefinite article – a blockchain – and two years before it morphed into an uncountable noun: "blockchain" as a concept.  (Imagine someone saying "I'm interested in ledger" and you'll understand why this drives some of us nuts. A blockchain is a tangible thing, not a practice, a process or a field of interest.)

But thinking about the etymology of these words is more than just an academic exercise. It helps us understand the motives and interests that fuel subtle but important changes in meaning. For example, recognizing that detaching the word "bitcoin" from "blockchain" works to neuter the former helps us see how those most threatened by cryptocurrency are trying to shape the debate. By the same token (no pun intended), if you don't understand why "blockchain," expressed as an uncountable noun, means something different from "a blockchain" or "the [bitcoin] blockchain," you could fall into a trap. It means you probably don't understand the technology you're dealing with and that someone could take advantage of you.

So, when Christian Smith, a colleague from the MIT Media Lab, gave an impassioned speech last week condemning the widespread use of "the blockchain," it irked me. Not only did he dis the definite-article form on which I'd cut my cryptocurrency teeth, he happily used the uncountable noun form. To be fair, he was speaking at the MIT Legal Forum on AI & Blockchain. Perhaps I have to accept this increasingly ubiquitous usage as an unavoidable fact of life? Like taxes.

Still, Smith raised some good points. He rightly observed that there is now a plethora of distributed ledgers carrying the label "blockchain," and thus that there is no monolithic single chain to which we all must adhere. And I fully share the disdain he expressed for that aggravating phrase, "just hash it and put it on the blockchain." But to banish the definite article seemed to me to deny the word's roots. I tend to view "the blockchain" as a nod to bitcoin's catalytic role in fostering wider interest in "blockchain technology." (Pro tip: if you want to talk about "blockchain" as a field of interest, use it as a modifier to a word like "technology"; it can also modify other words, like "pedant.") We still say "the wheel" to talk about other the starting point of that world-changing invention, don't we?

Origin of 'blockchain'

Hardcore bitcoin enthusiasts, those who have been in the space from the beginning, sometimes scoff at the newfound ubiquity of the word "blockchain." Back in the day, no one really thought of the blockchain as being especially significant, other than that it described the particular transaction recording system that bitcoin used, one that happened to be arranged into a cryptographically linked chain of blocks. "Blockchain" didn’t appear in Satoshi Nakamoto's initial white paper. It has been suggested the first usage came from Satoshi's early collaborator, Hal Finney, and even then in a less iconic, two-word construction – "block chain" – which Satoshi and others later picked up and used.

Once blockchain explorers were created, allowing people to more easily search the ledger, the single word started to gain significance. No doubt, its growing popularity was helped by the fact that the most popular of those software tools belonged to the startup named Blockchain – typically expressed with its URL extension ".info" to distinguish it from the bitcoin ledger.  (One mark of the confusion around all this is now found in how Blockchain.info's original logo is frequently used in slide decks by speakers seeking to illustrate a generic technology they call "blockchain.")

Dedicated bitcoin developers still don't really talk about the blockchain as an isolated thing of any great importance. They view bitcoin as an all-encompassing technology, within which the chain-of-blocks ledger is just one part.  I personally think the blockchain deserves to be recognized on its own. It's what gives bitcoin its immutable time-stamping capacity, allowing tricks like Julian Assange's "proof of life" and it lets us forecast when each halving will occur.

It also encapsulates the principle of the "longest chain" – contested as it may be – and, when the community is divided over a contentious hard fork proposal, as it was until recently, it's the blockchain that literally manifests that division. Still, core devs have a point: it's not entirely accurate to describe the blockchain, as many do, as the "technology underpinning bitcoin." Things got confusing when Wall Street banks got interested in distributed ledgers.

They used the phrase "blockchain without bitcoin," which misleadingly suggested that blockchains were not only important but more important than cryptocurrencies – even though, without the latter, it was impossible to have the groundbreaking permissionless, fully censorship-resistant, record of transactions that bitcoin introduced. This new usage had a purpose, of course. It allowed the newcomers in suits to strip the technology of its most disruptive characteristic – the fact that no one could control it – and impose their own control over it. It was a subtle but powerful act of appropriation.

What to do about it

Should we care about this? Well, yes, and no.

As anyone with teenagers knows, language, especially English, is always evolving. And it needs to. Language imposes rules on social interaction. It constrains what we can and can't do with expression. This helps us make sense of each other, but if the rules are overly inflexible, they limit our imagination and our capacity for innovation.

There is a cultural zeitgeist underway in the "blockchain space," a Cambrian explosion of ideas. We can do our part to try to steer the evolution of the language associated with that, but preventing change and new forms of expression is as difficult as stopping biological evolution. What we must demand is awareness of why we use the words we use and why others choose theirs. (I'll begrudgingly accept "blockchain" as an uncountable noun if others will understand why my co-author Paul Vigna and I put "The Blockchain" into the title of our new book to acknowledge the technology's bitcoin-rooted history.)

With awareness hopefully comes consistency of usage. That's vital if we are to develop this technology and its applications.  We need precision in communication if we are to come together and collaborate on the same ideas. If we are at least thinking, reading and educating ourselves about such matters, we can be more accepting of the fluidity of word usages. That way, we avoid the harmful, confining effects of political correctness for blockchain. (See what I just did there.) I only have one demand: don't, whatever you do, start using "blockchain" as a verb.

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MasterCard has filed a patent
on its own blockchain-based money transfer solution

In about 2014, most bitcoin companies quickly pivoted

to the “next big thing”: blockchain. Among them were the financial and fintech houses that were eager to avoid SEC scrutiny of their cryptocurrency holdings but were happy to use blockchain technology to speed up transaction times. Many of those early efforts are now apparently bearing fruit. MasterCard, for example, has just filed a patent for a “Method and System For Instantaneous Payment Using Recorded Guarantees.” This is, in short, a patent for a blockchain-like system that offers instant payment. It is not a clone, per se, but a patent that assumes that a blockchain-like ledger will be available to store and manage international transactions instantly.

The patent describes:

While the abstract itself doesn’t mention blockchain, MasterCard intends to use the technology in the process, describing a step in which “the payment guarantee data stored in the third data element included in the received transaction message includes at least a blockchain network identifier and (i) a public key or (ii) a destination address, the record of payment guarantee is a blockchain transaction for payment of the transaction amount stored in the second data element included in the received transaction message to (i) the destination address or (ii) a destination address associated with the public key.

The computing system is a node in a blockchain network corresponding to the blockchain network identifier.” That’s definitely a mouthful, but it basically means they’ll store a record of the transaction in some immutable form. MasterCard has explored blockchain tech before even as its CEO attacked bitcoin publicly. This tendency to cut the cryptocurrency out of a blockchain discussion is not new and it’s not stopping any time soon. Whether it works, however, is a different question.

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CoinHive Cryptocurrency Miner Is 6th Most Common Malware, Says Report

Cyber-security solutions provider Check Point Software

has said that the threat from cryptocurrency mining malware is rapidly growing. According to the company's latest Global Threat Impact Index report, the CoinHive variant became the sixth most-used malware in October. CoinHive – a JavaScript program that lurks unseen on websites – works by tapping the processing power of visitors' computers to mine monero.

Maya Horowitz, threat intelligence group manager at Check Point, said in a press release that the emergence of mining malware like CoinHive highlights the "need for advanced threat prevention technologies" to curb such practices and protect networks from cyber-criminals.

Horowitz added:

"Crypto mining is a new, silent, yet significant actor in the threat landscape, allowing threat actors to make significant revenues while victims' endpoints and networks suffer from latency and decreased performance."

According to the report, malware variant RoughTed (adware) topped the index, followed by Locky (ransomware) and Seamless (traffic redirection). Recently, internet domain provider Cloudflare suspended websites that ran hidden cryptocurrency miners, including that of the operator of torrent site ProxyBunker. This site was said to be running the Coinhive miner for four days prior to the suspension.

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Dash is seeking direction after hitting new highs.

After setting a new record above $500 on Sunday, the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization fell back to near $350 today before regaining poise above the $400 mark. As of writing, the dash-U.S. dollar (DASH/USD) exchange rate is $403. As per CoinMarketCap, the cryptocurrency is up 4.58 percent over the last 24 hours, and 48 percent in the last month.

The record rally seen over the weekend is reportedly due to the flow of money out of bitcoin and into alternative cryptocurrencies triggered by last week's suspension of the Segwit2x hard fork. Following the last-minute move to halt a controversial bitcoin upgrade, the markets saw a broad rally in the tokens of competing blockchains such as dash, bitcoin cash and others.

Also possibly driving price gains, the dash core team has announced the latest release of its software, a major upgrade that would bring a 2 MB block size and lower and transaction fees. The move may further strengthen the appeal of dash as a payment network, especially among those who believe that on-blockchain scaling will ultimately boost performance. The price chart analysis suggests the base has shifted higher to around $380 levels and that prices could revisit record highs sooner rather than later.

A Dash chart shows:

• Prices spiked after spending a better part of the last month defending the support level of $250.
• The 5-day MA and 10-day MA signal a strong bullish bias (slope upwards), thus dips are likely to be short-lived.
• The rising trendline (red) is seen offering support around $325 levels and the descending trendline is likely to act as a support around $306 levels.
• Yesterday's close was above the critical resistance of $414.

Thus, the stars seem nicely aligned in favor of the bulls. However, the relative strength index is overbought. Furthermore, the 1-hour chart below does show scope for a pullback to $350 levels.

A chart shows:

• Bearish price RSI divergence led to a strong pullback.
• The RSI favors further losses.
• However, the 50-MA and 100-MA are sloping upwards, so any dips to $350 levels are likely to be short-lived.

View

• A potential technical correction $350 cannot be ruled out but could be quickly reversed.
• Given the upward sloping nature of the key moving averages, the base appears to have shifted higher to around $380 levels.
• A nice consolidation around $380–$400 could yield a fresh rally to record highs above $500.

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