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Bitcoin (BTC) remains on the hunt for $9,000, having established a bullish pattern at key price support in the last 24 hours.

The leading cryptocurrency by market capitalization is currently trading at $8,730 on Bitstamp, representing a 0.8 percent gain on the day. Prices hit a high of $8,785 earlier today.

Trading kicked off on a pessimistic note on Wednesday, with prices falling below the former resistance-turned-support of $8,500 (July 2018 high) in the Asian trading hours.

However, the drop to levels close to the May 16 high of $8,390 – also a former hurdle-turned-support – was short-lived and prices bounced back to $8,663 by UTC close, according to Bitstamp data.

Essentially, BTC established a bullish higher-low pattern in the key support zone yesterday, strengthening the bullish case put put forward by Sunday’s pennant breakout.

The path of least resistance, therefore, is to the higher side. Even so, buyers need to observe caution, as the cryptocurrency has already rallied more than 60 percent this month. Sudden price pullbacks are usually seen after such stellar rallies.

4-hour chart

BTC witnessed a bull flag breakout – a continuation pattern known to accelerate the preceding bullish move – on the 4-hour chart earlier today, creating room for a rally to $9,940 (target as per the measured move method).

The pennant breakout confirmed on Sunday has already opened the doors to $10,000.

On the way higher, BTC may face resistance at  $9,442 – the 38.2 percent Fibonacci retracement of the drop from the December 2017 high to December 2018 low.

It is worth noting that BTC created a doji candle with a long upper shadow – a sign of buyer exhaustion – in the four hours to 08:00 UTC, marking a weak follow-through to the bull flag breakout.

Should the doji candle’s high of $8,785 prove a tough nut to crack over the next few hours, a price pullback could be seen.

The case for a rise to $9,000, however, would weaken only if the newly established higher low at $8,420 is breached.

Daily chart

The daily trading volume bars continue to produce lower highs, contradicting the higher highs on price.

That bearish volume divergence takes the shine off the pennant breakout confirmed Sunday and indicates that the rally to $9,000 or above could be short-lived or may be preceded by a correction to $8,000.

Trading volumes need to pick up for a sustained move above $9,000.

Disclosure: The author holds no cryptocurrency assets at the time of writing.

Bitcoin image via Shutterstock; charts by Trading View

Three of Ireland’s “Big Four” banks are using blockchain tech to verify employees’ credentials.

The Bank of Ireland, AIB and Ulster Bank are using a blockchain solution from Deloitte for the pilot initiative, news outlet Fora reported Thursday.

The solution, said to be the “first of its kind” in the European financial services industry, has been built using ethereum by Deloitte’s EMEA Financial Services Blockchain Lab in Dublin to verify and track staff credentials and qualifications data, according to the report.

Staff will have their credentials held in a digital wallet, which will be used to help banks comply with Central Bank of Ireland regulations for meeting specific standards for senior staff.

Ireland’s Institute of Banking – which holds professional certification data on 23,500 banking employees currently – is also a participant in the project, which is expected to run until the end of the summer. A full live launch expected by mid-2020 for the institute’s members, according to the report.

Blockchain-based verification of credentials is a growing use case for the technology.

Earlier this year, financial services giant PwC launched a similar blockchain-based platform called Smart Credentials allowing company employees to be issued digital copies of professional qualifications.

Malaysia’s education ministry has also launched a blockchain platform called e-Scroll for the issuance and verification of university degrees. While U.S. Customs and Border Protection also recently began a blockchain trial to verify North American Free Trade Agreement and the Central American Free Trade Agreement certificates.

The three Irish banks have been trialing blockchain tech in other areas, too. As far back as 2016, AIB and Ulster Bank participated in a blockchain payments trial, also organized by Deloitte. The Bank of Ireland completed a blockchain trial centered on trade reporting in partnership with Deloitte in 2017.

Dublin image via Shutterstock

Thousands of cheese-shaped cartoon wizards will soon duel online for a grand prize of ether tokens.

Dapper Labs, the company behind the 2017 CryptoKitties craze, unveiled its newest ethereum-based gaming experience – “Cheeze Wizards” – last Friday. The game has already attracted 973 players who purchased 4,470 fighters, according to Dapper Labs head of communications Bryce Bladon.

Most of the ether spent on these digital wizards goes toward prizes, with 607 ETH going to the game’s grand prize. A total of 1,013 ETH has been collected so far, for roughly $275,000 at current prices.

Bladon told CoinDesk the first tournament, where all these wizards duel until just one is left with “the big cheese,” will take several weeks and kick off later this summer.

“Players summon wizards, each of which is a non-fungible token (NFT),” Bladon said. “The winner gets a portion of the losing wizard’s power. … Using rock-paper-scissors logic, a winner is picked for each of the five spells cast.”

Since this online game involves monetary prizes, users from Canada, Arkansas, Arizona, Kentucky, Maryland, South Carolina and Tennessee are unable to participate in tournaments because the relevant regulations in those jurisdictions are unclear. However, gamers from these areas have already found ways to develop external applications so they can participate in the ecosystem. At least five different projects have already been built on the cheesetastic game, from a prediction market to a decentralized exchange platform for trading wizards.

Dapper Labs itself attracted more than $15 million in investment last year from funds like Venrock, Google’s GV, Samsung Next and Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures. Like the studio’s debut game CryptoKitties, the self-custodied NFTs in “Cheeze Wizards” are designed to acquire unique traits that could provide opportunities for usage beyond the Dapper Labs tournament itself.

One Canadian player, Glenn Eggleton, has already created a leader board and external battle game in order to experiment with the partially open-source project.

“Building decentralized applications [dapps] is extremely time-consuming because the industry is so very young,” Eggleton told CoinDesk. “With each new dapp the technology gets better and better. As a community we are funding the development of that technology by playing, which I think is super cool.”

Bladon agreed that extensibility – meaning the ability to take the asset away from the original game and use it elsewhere – is the determining factor for Dapper Labs’ crypto games. “Cheeze Wizards” uses the startup’s ethereum wallet, Dapper, yet is also compatible with most crypto wallets.

He said the most salient lesson the gaming startup learned from CryptoKitties was the importance of fostering a community that will build on and contribute to a robust ecosystem. This is what distinguishes dapps from other gaming experiences.

As such, Bladon said Dapper Labs plans to create opportunities and support for developers who want to build tools, features and parallel experiences related to “Cheeze Wizards.”

“[Community] is the one thing you can’t really fake at scale,” he said, adding:

“A lot of blockchain games are trying to appeal to the mass market by sacrificing the decentralization and using side chains or hosted solutions. We want to go to the other side of the spectrum and create a game with the community for an experiment with user behavior in crypto networks.”

Correction (May 30, 15:45 UTC): “Cheeze Wizards” users spent 1,013 ETH in the first week, not 607 ETH. The previously reported 607 ETH is the amount from the total pool directed toward the game’s grand prize. The story and its headline have been updated with the correct values (“Nearly $200K” was the amount previously listed in the headline).

“Cheeze Wizards” image via Dapper Labs

Craig Wright, the Australian entrepreneur who recently and controversially filed copyright registrations for the bitcoin white paper and original code, now has a legal rival.

A second copyright registration (number TX0008726120) for the white paper has appeared on the public catalog of the United States Copyright Office, indicating that a certain Wei Liu is also claiming to have originated the work under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.

The filing is dated May 24, 2019, while Wright’s is dated April 11, 2019.

Currently, it is not clear who Wei Liu is or why the registration was filed. However, it may well be that it is a counter to Wright’s move to assert ownership of fundamental bitcoin property. That came amid a flurry of legal threats from Wright against those who claim he is not Satoshi as he has claimed on various occasions – though he has yet to provide indisputable proof, such as a movement of Satoshi’s bitcoin.

Wright is also a key mover behind the cryptocurrency Bitcoin SV (for “Satoshi Vision”) and said he would put the copyright registration in the hands of the foundation managing the token.

A press release sent to CoinDesk at the time reads:

“In the future, Wright intends to assign the copyright registrations to Bitcoin Association to hold for the benefit of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Bitcoin Association is a global industry organization for Bitcoin businesses. It supports BSV and owns the Bitcoin SV client software.”

To be clear, a registration is not recognition of a work’s authorship by the U.S. Copyright Office. The copyright process allows anyone to register a work, often in relation to lawsuits associated with ownership.

Indeed, the office said in a press release after the Wright registrations stirred up something of a storm, that it has not “recognized” anyone as the inventor of bitcoin.

“As a general rule, when the Copyright Office receives an application for registration, the claimant certifies as to the truth of the statements made in the submitted materials. The Copyright Office does not investigate the truth of any statement made,” the Copyright Office wrote.

“In a case in which a work is registered under a pseudonym, the Copyright Office does not investigate whether there is a provable connection between the claimant and the pseudonymous author,” it clarified.

The same will apply to the registration by Wei Liu.

Bitcoin image via Shutterstock

Government authorities in China’s Sichuan province are reportedly probing into local bitcoin mining farms that have allegedly been constructed without official approval.

A state-owned newspaper in Sichuan published a front-page article on Thursday saying the land-resource bureau in Sichuan’s Garze county has found bitcoin mining farms with no prior approval built at the sites of hydropower stations.

The article added that the Economic and Information Bureau in Garze – a mountainous area with abundant water resources – has formed a committee with other agencies to probe into the illegal construction issue.

“We are still investigating on the issue and can’t disclose more details on the overall situation,” one official from the Economic and Information Bureau was quoted as saying.

The issue at hand is that bitcoin mining farms were found being built at hydropower stations along the Dadu river in northwestern Sichuan to make the most of the cheap electricity in the area, but did not obtain authorization for construction beforehand.

The article identified one specific bitcoin mining facility within a hydropower plant called Ginkang station, which has the capacity to host 50,000 units of bitcoin mining equipment, of which 60 percent are already operating.

“If [a bitcoin mining farm] is built within the authorized area of a power station for electricity consumption, we need to verify if their usage is legal. If it’s outside the authorized area, then it needs to be dealt with as the construction was not approved,” an official from the local land resource bureau said in the report.

As the summer rainy season approaches in China, miners have been investing again in Sichuan’s mountainous areas including the Garze and Aba counties, hoping to boost ROI with the regions’ cheap power.

In a report published last November by blockchain research firm Coinshare, nearly 50 percent of the global bitcoin network’s hash rate came from facilities located in Sichuan at the time.

Recently, the bitcoin network’s total hash rate has climbed to nearly 58,000 petahashes per second – that’s up about 80 percent from last December, when more than 600,000 mining machines were estimated to have shut down amid bitcoin’s bear market prices.

The official from the Economic and Information Bureau further indicated that Garze county does not allow bitcoin mining projects.

They said:

“We don’t allow outside investment in the area to be involved in bitcoin. Even for big data projects, we will conduct an investigation into the nature of the data involved before making a decision.”

Mining facility image via CoinDesk archive