Halving has happened. What's next?

On May 11, at 19 hours 23 minutes ETC, another Bitcoin halving took place, as a result of which the reward for finding a new block was halved from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC. How did the market react to this event and what awaits the cryptocurrency community further?

What effect from halving do we observe now? The BTC rate began to grow, and all other cryptocurrencies from the TOP-20 are in the green zone, but we hardly can call it a rapid growth. However, Bitcoin has almost returned to the pre-halving level of $10000 per coin.

There are other positive changes - the hashrate of the bitcoin network has begun to decline, as well as the percentage of the next expected level of the network complexity. But no one should be surprised, because miners who use the obsolete hardware, such as Antminer S9 (which still accounts for about 20 percent of the hashrate) have already started to leave the network. Nevertheless, the Bitcoin mining can still be profitable by using newer and more advanced devices, which we wrote about a couple of days ago.

Accordingly, now we can already say that at least one of the catastrophic after-halving scenarios will not come true. There are no massive disconnections of mining equipment from the Bitcoin network, which means that there are no reasons for stagnation or a deep crisis.

There is an argument that Bitcoin will not skyrocket at the near future, even because the actual volume of Bitcoin trading is 50 times higher than 4 years ago at the time of the second halving. But on the other hand, it is obvious that miners will make every effort to push the bitcoin rate up in order to increase the profitability of mining. In 2016, this led to the bull rally, which lasted more than a year.

As for the other projections and exchange trends, judging by the Bitcoin behavior (and the entire market in general) in the first hours and days after the halving, it is still too early to talk about anything specific. Although it should be reminded, that most experts are tending to believe that the third Bitcoin halving can repeat the scenarios of the first two, and the price of the cryptocurrency will be several times higher than now, but most likely it will not happen quickly.