Bitcoin’s recent price performance was a roller coaster ride with bearish troughs and bullish crests. Although the cryptocurrency started the year with a bang, it was difficult for the Succeding months. Bitcoin even hit its yearly low last week when its value dropped below the $4000 mark.
In a recent series of tweets, Nic Carter, Coinmetrics.io’s co-founder, investigated whether Bitcoin was actually’ dying’ as many claimed it was.
Bitcoin transactions have been hit low recently in the midst of market crashes and pandemic scares. The plummeting prices also caused a flood of investors to sell their assets, resulting in more tectonic shifts in the market. Friday brought some good news to the market as Bitcoin prices jumped by more than 20 percent.
This shift was also pointed out by Nic Carter as he claimed Bitcoin transactions were heterogeneous. Analysts had pointed out that the Bitcoin transaction at the moment, was the lowest it had been since Mach 2019. Carter’s logic was that the bulk of all Bitcoin transactions involved moving BTC around out of which some use arbitrary data functions.
Carer pointed out that the transaction count that most people saw was a mix of Omni protocol and the series like Veriblock. The Omni protocol is present within the OP_RETURN code of Bitcoin and is utilized by Tether. Apart from Omni, we also have products like Veriblock. The functionality of Veriblock was that it used Bitcoin’s blockspace as an anchor for other blockchains. The Coinmetric co-founder added:
“Here’s txn count with OP_RETURN stripped out. The bulk of the non Omni OP_RETURN transactions are Veriblock. You can see where the VB testnet was turned off in early 2019. Recently its activity has subsided too. Regular BTC transactions are quite steady.”
Regular Bitcoin transactions involved movement from and to exchanges as well as peer to peer transactions. It is understandable to see why the cryptocurrency industry is in panic. With the arrival of Coronavirus and rumors of a large recession, investors were in the throes of panic. This was one of the reasons Bitcoin crashed more than 40percent this month.
Some user’s responded to Carter with Dan K tweeting:
“I’d see it more like Gold… People aren’t buying things with gold, but they’ll certainly invest in it… Bitcoin by product perhaps!? Unintended, but okay usage IDK!”
After a day of gains, at press time Bitcoin was trading for $6,205.97 with a total market cap of $113.44 billion. According to Coinmetric data, there has been a rise in batching activity in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This came right after Coinbase launched its batching initiative.
Coinbase claimed that Bitcoin transaction batching will boost usability and scalability by reducing the network fees and increasing transaction throughput. Transactions were also reported to be getting bigger on average which was a marker for batching. These indicators were a positive sign for Bitcoin as many proponents were waiting for the cryptocurrency’s halving in May.