Cryptocurrencies End The Week Down

Cryptocurrencies ended the week on a down note, with all of the leading digital tokens lodging losses.

According to a report in MarketWatch, Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency, ended the trading session Friday (August 10) down 1.9 percent on the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange. That comes after a surge in trading earlier in the week. Bitcoin has been up only twice since July 29, noted MarketWatch. “Long gone are the hopes of retaking $8k, and now only a few hundred dollars separates us from another lower-low. This chart is very sick and we still have a way to go before this over,” wrote Jani Ziedins of CrackedMarket on Friday, reported MarketWatch.

According to the report, over the course of a 13-day period, the market capitalization for all of the digital tokens has declined $70 billion. At the same time, bitcoin’s market share has increased. It hit a high of 49.1 percent this year.  Meanwhile the CBOE Global Market’s bitcoin futures ended the week down, as did CME’s bitcoin futures.

Despite the sell-off, bitcoin is getting new usages. Late last week, Dish, one of the largest television providers in the U.S., announced that it would accept Bitcoin Cash payments from customers, according to a new report. In 2014, the satellite company became one of the first providers to accept bitcoin. The new policy was made possible under an agreement with BitPay, which provides streamlined payments for bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Dish COO John Swieringa said in a statement that the company gets “a steady volume of customers paying with cryptocurrency each month, and BitPay will allow us to continue offering more choice and convenience to our customers.”

In the announcement, Dish said that customers can pay for monthly subscriptions, as well as pay-per-view movies and events. The company said that Dish customers can send, in a push transaction, the exact amount of bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash required to make one-time payments on mydish.com or Dish’s Hopper DVR. The company said that BitPay exchanges the payments at the exact moment of the transaction, so there is no volatility risk associated with the cryptocurrency transaction.