In a significant turnaround in the markets today, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) has surged by more than $1,000 in less than half an hour. Not only is it now well above the $10,000 threshold, but it is also one of the sharpest recoveries in the past year.

The Bitcoin price had been on a gradual slide throughout the start of Thursday, in the aftermath of yesterday’s Congressional hearing. Just after the beginning of the American trading day, BTC fell to just under $9,400.

Facebook took a hammering this week, with the proposed Libra currency taking fire from blockchain skeptics and decentralization advocates alike. But there is one silver lining to come from this weeks’ hearings: the prospect of a global, corporate digital cryptocurrency appears to have spurred Congress into action.

In a pointed backhander to Google’s now-defunct “Don’t be Evil” mantra, Blockstack is piling on an extra incentive to encourage app developers to use their decentralized computing platform.

Their call to developers is to create apps that “Can’t be Evil”, with a developer reward program that will increase payouts from $100,000 to $1 million per month in its App Mining Program by May 2020. Blockstack PBC is a public benefit corporation that wants to decentralize computing and return privacy to users.

• Litecoin has a bearish short-term bias, with the LTC / USD pair still undergoing a major downside breakout
• The four-hour time frame shows that bulls are testing back towards the neckline of a bearish head and shoulders pattern
• The daily time frame highlights a strong technical bounce from the LTC / USD pair’s 200-day moving average

Litecoin has a bearish short-term bias, with the LTC / USD pair still in a bearish breakout mode over the lower time frames.

• Zcash has a bearish short-term trading bias, with the cryptocurrency trading at its lowest level since May 2019
• The four-hour time frame shows that a bearish head and shoulders pattern has now reached its full downside projection
• The ZEC / USD pair has also bounced sharply from its key 200-day moving average

Zcash has a bearish short-term outlook, with the ZEC / USD pair tumbling to its lowest trading level since May this year.

• Nano has a bearish short-term trading outlook, with the NANO / USD pair struggling to recover back above key technical resistance
• The four-hour time frame shows a bearish head and shoulders pattern that has yet to reach its full downside target
• The daily time frame shows an extremely large bullish falling wedge pattern

Nano has been getting some respite from the downtrend after the project released the latest version of its node softwa

A new report by cryptocurrency aggregator site CoinGecko suggests exchange hacks have become increasingly sophisticated in the first half of 2019. The report also noted these vulnerabilities could be addressed by developing decentralized trading platforms.

NEO and Ontology have announced a partnership to facilitate interoperability between the two Chinese blockchain giants. The collaboration underpins the commitment that founder Da Hongfei has made to driving NEO 3.0 forward, with the goal of becoming the top blockchain platform in the world in 2020.

ETH 2.0 is just around the corner — or at least that’s what many imagined. But waiting for Ethereum to scale is a bit like waiting for Godot, and Vitalik Buterin has an idea to scale network capabilities right now.

The Qtum open-source blockchain platform has announced its partnership with Beam, a privacy coin based on the Mimblewimble protocol, in order to bring its users trustless atomic swaps.