Why bitcoin is charging to $10,000 By Gary McFarlane | Fri, 27th April 2018 – 14:19
Post tax-day rally? The clerical edict that crypto is halal? Institutional money warming to the sector? ‘Whales’ buying with vigour? The penny dropping that regulation is not such a bad thing on the contrary? Or could it be that simply the price of bitcoin fell low enough to attract buyers? Whatever the cause(s), crypto is back with a bang!
It may have been bitcoin that led the sector out of the wilderness, but it’s the altcoins that have been making the most progress, but let’s start with bitcoin.
The top cryptocurrency is up 14.8% this week alone and 12% over the month, its best run since December. Bitcoin broke above its 100-day moving average at $9,300 for the first time since the end of January, although has fallen back since to trade at $8,786.
After an exhilarating rally, the crypto market was hit by profit-taking on Wednesday, suggesting the move to $10,000 may take a little longer than hoped for at the beginning of the week.
Nevertheless, altcoins have been outperforming bitcoin on the shift in gear upwards, with some notable advances by top-tier alts.
Chief among those was the 80% increase in the value of Bitcoin Cash in the week to 23 April, a surge that may have been helped by the looming hard fork. BCH, itself a hard fork from bitcoin that increased the block size from 1MB to 8MB, is being forked into Bitcoin ABC which increases block size to 32MB.
Theoretically that means ABC should be 32 times faster at processing transaction because of the greater capacity.
Bitcoin Cash, which has the vocal backing of entrepreneur Roger Ver, the owner of the bitcoin.com news site, is positioning itself as the version of bitcoin that works for payments. However, in both the Cash and ABC forks, the tweaks in block size still don’t bring anywhere near the transaction speeds of Visa or Mastercard, so it is a moot point whether these coins go far enough.
The next largest outperformers in the week to 23 April are EOS and IOTA, which rose 46% and 37% respectively.
EOS is building a blockchain platform for decentralised applications (dapps) and chose to conduct a year-long initial coin offering. That ICO comes to an end on 1 June.
The project began its rewards airdrop on 19 April to token holders who have backed the project since inception, in which it is distributing 5 million EOS tokens.
The EOS blockchain (mainnet) goes live on the day after the ICO ends, on 2 June. The project says that 15 dapps have been tested and are ready for the launch. At the beginning of April EOS released a developer version of the platform, known as Dawn 3.0 which meant dapps could be tested. The success of the project, backed by block.one, in keeping to its roadmap has seen positive sentiment building around its efforts. EOS, in common but to a lesser extent than other alts, has given up some of its gains, falling back to $14.39 from its high on Tuesday 24 April at $15.
99.
IOTA, dubbed the internet of things token, has been pushed higher by the imminent launch of the Trinity wallet which will make it much more straightforward to store the token and there is even talk of a storage feature coming to the popular Nano Ledger hard wallet.
An announcement on 10 April that Dr Rolf Werner, head of Central Europe business at Japanese tech giant Fujitsu, was joining the IOTA Foundation has also boosted the token price. IOTA (MIOTA) is currently trading at $1.
87, although was a priced as high as 2.20 on 24 April.
Second-placed coin Ethereum has also had a healthy bounce of more than a quarter at one stage this week and is currently at $628, up 34% over the past month. The popular MyEtherWallet online wallet has two of its DNS servers hijacked this week, which took the shine off the blockchain platform’s rally.
Ethereum is the top platform for launching decentralised apps but has scaling issues that are yet to be addressed, leaving the door open for other projects such as EOS to seek to fill the gap.
A notable underperformer has been Litecoin, the very first fork from bitcoin. It is down 3% over the past seven days and up just 1% in the month to date. Trading at 145 today, Litecoin had touched 161 two days ago. The price was on a steady climb from $115 in early April into the $150s, on hopes for the LitePay payments launch speeding adoption of the currency as a means of payment, but that project was abandoned amid much acrimony on 20 April.
Ripple (XRP) and Stellar also saw 30% plus gains and saw some consolidation a little below their near-term highs in the past two days. On Friday though Stellar (XLM) is up 10% at $0.41.
UK’s Populous fires the starting gun
Finally, Populous, a UK-based blockchain project aimed at disrupting invoice discounting with its decentralised marketplace for buying and selling invoices, announced this week that its beta will go live on 1 May.
Chief executive Steve Williams explained the rollout in exclusive comments to Interactive Investor: ” Populous’ Beta will transition into Beta-live on May 1st 2018, starting with a few selected PPT holders to benefit from being able to trade a live invoice from real companies. To achieve that, PPT holders can receive Pokens (our in-platform credits) from their PPT, which can then be used to purchase a pre-selected single invoice on the platform.
“The purpose of Beta-live is to allow Populous to put the platform and technologies in a monitored, controlled environment to determine if there is an “OK” signal to start accepting the massive influx of PPT holders who are eager to begin purchasing real invoices, helping businesses with short-term cash flow and making use of our available XBRL data.
“The selected PPT holders will have access to a gradual roll-out of invoices during the beta-live period to start with, which will be ramping up in volume as the platform prepares to be opened to the general public.
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The project was founded by Williams in November 2016. Populous is the 33rd-ranked coin by market cap, according to Coinmarketcap and is valued at $871 million. The PPT token trades at $23.5, and is 3.7% higher today.
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