 After the dramatic market fall at the end of 2018, crypto markets were pretty common flat. We talked to eToro's Maddie Greenspan, Patrick Hooster from Crypto Broker AG and Anthony Pompiano from Morgan Creek Digital and asked them what was the reason behind such low volatility in what to expect in the nearest weeks. We were looking at volumes across the four big exchanges, Bitstamp, Kraken, Coinbase and Bitfinex and over the past six months, those exchanges had volumes of roughly 109,000 coins per month. January only produced 65,000 coins, then as well focus on EtherDollar which has some erratic price movements around the $100 mark. We think this is linked to the MakerDAO stablecoin. There are some liquidation levels just below the $100 mark on this MakerDAO stablecoin. We will start with EtherBTC. There we can see that we took out recent lows in December 2018. The chart looks very weak and we think there is more weakness to come. There is also some erratic price movements on that chart but that is driven by EtherDollar. Our main focus is still the MACD charts and the advanced decline line charts. If you look at the Bitcoin MACD you can clearly see that there is some strength around versus the altcoins. That hasn't changed. If you look at the MACDs for the altcoins ranking 2 to 10 and 11 to 50, those are clearly in negative territory. And last but not least, the smoothed out advanced decline line, the purple one, trading below the 0.5 level which is a negative sentiment for the altcoins. I believe that it really right now what we are seeing is the market is trying to find a more fair value that can accurately be described as what the cryptos are actually worth according to adoption and real use. I believe that we are testing the lower limits at the moment. I think it is pretty clear that the market is trying to find a bottom. For Bitcoin for example, we found a very clear level of support at $3,000 a coin. Certainly it could dip a little bit below that. But if I had to describe it, what I would say is that right now it is looking for a floor. I think it is more likely than not that we have not hit the bottom yet. The market was incredibly frothy throughout 2017, 2018 we were able to wash a lot of that out. But I still think there is a little bit of that unreasonable expectations and projects that shouldn't really be valued where they are today. We have got a little more to flush out. So until that happens I just think that we are going to follow that macro trend of the bear market and especially we will hit a bottom. We have a pretty new tool provided by LedgerX which is the Bitcoin VIX, basically they call it the fear index. Just like in the stock market they have a volatility index. And this is over the last three months. So we can see that during the big fall in December we saw a big hike in volatility. And over the last month really the volatility has come down a lot. But still not where it was before that big dip. But you can see it kind of leveling off at the moment. I think volatility can't be something that is persistent. So you can't have an asset that just swings kind of 50% either direction day in, day out for years. And so what you end up getting is you get these short spurts of high volatility and then you get these periods of kind of a more lulled timeframe. So in 2017 for example a majority of the upward volatility, the appreciation of price was attributable to like 10 or less days. And so I think what we are seeing now is this downward price pressure from the high of 20,000 to where we are today, there's only been a certain number of days that have contributed to that. It hasn't been highly volatile every single day. And so if you remember back I think it was October of 2018, Bitcoin was actually less volatile than the S&P 500, the NASDAQ. And so I think that there's these periods where the asset will be highly volatile but then there's these longer periods where we won't get volatility and I think that's where we are right now. We had a pop in Ripple the other day of 10%. Basically it had erased the losses from the previous week in about an hour. It was something to see. What's being perpetuated on the social media at the moment is this is due to a partnership that happened between SWIFT banking system and R3 which is a payment startup. R3 is connected to Ripple Labs. They've just announced a kind of partnership in December. Overall what we're looking at is basically over the last year or two years we've been witnessing a battle within the payments industry. And what we're noticing just now is that rather than a battle it's kind of a network where there's a lot of major players. They're all fighting for market share but at the same time they're growing a kind of interoperable network where payments will be using the power of technology much quicker, much faster, much cheaper down the line based on those partnerships. And what it seems is that Ripple Labs is increasingly gaining stature within that network. When it comes to kind of short-term price appreciation, especially double digits like we saw with XRP recently, most of that is driven by the public announcements. I tend to think that public announcements are able to affect price whether it's public equities or cryptocurrencies. The difference is the public markets we see a lot of people who there's just better price discovery. There's more people who understand how that public announcement will actually affect the bottom line. There's better projections and accuracy. So in crypto we don't have that yet. So what you get is more volatile swings on stock on prices compared to stocks but over time I think we'll get better at trying to price some of this stuff in or the market will become less volatile or less reacted to those types of announcements because people will have a better understanding of how they actually impact the underlying asset or fundamentals. Cointelegraph, like, subscribe and hodl.