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Crypto Rally

Litecoin keeps flourishing as halving gets closer and closer

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The first of January this year, 2019, saw Litecoin sitting at $30 after a prolonged bearish period in the cryptocurrency markets known as the Crypto Winter. Then the bulls got a hold of the crypto market and ran with it – leading to a massive increase in the total market cap and a fresh wave of enthusiasm.

One of the leading lights of this new surge was Litecoin (LTC), which jumped in value by over 500% and is now sits at around $140.

The reason for Litecoin’s massive bull run has been, in part, due to the halving that is coming up in just under 60 days. The positive traders, the major bulls, expect this trend to continue – well past the halving and are awaiting the fourth largest cryptocurrency in the world to continue to show strength based on a variety of factors.

However, there are always contrarians, and in this case, they are saying that Litecoin has had its days – the halving has done its work and the potential future profits would be flat at best, and would halve along with the network at worst. These contrarians are the bears, your extremely risk-averse traders that see plummeting prices behind every corner and the charts may back their views.

Halving, the main driver of Litecoin bull run

Whatever the opinions come int the future, for now, all traders agree that the price increase of LTC is being driven mainly by the halving of block rewards that are happening in a couple of months. A halving is a significant event in any cryptocurrency and is a system whereby the reward for mining is halved. Miners are the ones who validate all transactions on a network and are thus crucial to the well being of a cryptocurrency.

What a halving does is limit supply so that current demand is constricted and the price of the asset goes up. This provides further incentive for miners to continue with their work and gives investors in the cryptocurrency a nice profit from their earlier investments.

What does this mean for LTC?

The difference in opinions, throughout the market, is whether the halving will have a positive or a negative effect on prices at this time. While many are looking at the market as a whole and seeing continued growth in all areas of the cryptocurrency market, others are more pessimistic.

The pessimists see Litecoin plummeting to around $55 after the initial euphoria of the halving passes, and believe that the pre-halving rally has frontloaded the price meaning that this is about as high as it will go for the time being barring unforeseen circumstances. This probably is a possibility that can’t be ignored.

The optimists see the halving as the start of a surge to a thousand dollar value of Litecoin, and a return to previous highs shortly. There is a middle path, and many are not giving this view enough attention. It could well be that the market has subconsciously priced in the halving already, but that the increasing appetite for crypto assets will provide the continued push that is needed for Litecoin to slowly but surely increase in price.

At the press time, LTC price stands at $137.79 after going up by over 35% in the last seven days. Both hourly and daily price charts of the coin are green, too.

Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.

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Google Searches for Bitcoin See Tremendous Spike

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Bitcoins rally over the last two months has seen it become a focal point of conversations around the watercooler again. The cryptocurrency market is now in full swing and Bitcoin currently stands strong with a price of $8130 (at the press time) after having started the year at just $3800. That is a massive growth of 210% over the course of barely five months, most of which happened during the last two months.

May specifically has been a rollercoaster with different days where the cryptocurrency shott up in value by over a thousand dollars. Both times, it was due to frantic trading on the early Asian markets that spurred the meteoric rise and many think it had to do with the faltering of Asian currencies in the face of an ongoing and costly trade war between the United States and China.

Google data shows public interest in Bitcoin is increasing

Data from Google Trends shows that Bitcoin is only getting more and more popular as time goes by. Looking at the last 90 days of data, there is a definitive bump in interest around the beginning of April when Bitcoin broke through the $5000 barrier, and the conversations started around whether there would be a bottoming or if it was a false dawn.

Since then, however, the data has shown a sharp increase in the search term “bitcoin” and like it looks like the trend will continue surging upwards for the foreseeable future regardless of the price fluctuations. It is interesting to note that the NFL players are asking to be paid in cryptocurrency now (in Bitcoin in particular).

This type of popular appeal is a sign that Bitcoin is maturing and that more and more people are slowly becoming comfortable with the idea of a cryptocurrency. It is easy to forget that Bitcoin is barely 10 years old and that there were similar bubbles and misgivings when the internet started to become mainstream.

African countries are most interested

The 90 day and 365-day trends show that most of the interest in the Bitcoin search term came from two African countries, namely Nigeria and South Africa. In top 5, only Austria is not from Africa as St Helena and Ghana take up the other two spots.

Following on from that, 6-10 are Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany Australia and Singapore. While only Switzerland can be looked at as a crypto friendly jurisdiction, it does show that the people from these ten countries are becoming ever more interested in cryptocurrency as a whole. Undoubtedly, Bitcoin has been known to be the gateway crypto for many people.

This is great news as the ICO problems of late 2017 and early 2018 turned many people off from cryptocurrencies and what this data shows is that people are willing to give cryptocurrencies another chance. The more people learn about Bitcoin and crypto, the better it will be for the entire sector and we might even see crypto take place in our daily lives sooner than many had imagined.

Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.

Bitcoin is rallying, but what does it mean?

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The Bitcoin price rally keeps moving forward, and it’s nothing short of spectacular. Over the weekend, the cryptocurrency went as far up as USD 7.355,00, which is equivalent to a 14% increase in spot prices. After reaching that peak, it went back to the 7,1k level and spent some time trading sideways, but it rallied again and, as we write this it’s worth $8022. The total market capitalization stands at $142,009,729,271. So after 18 months talking about underperformance, analysts are now starting to say (as in 2017) that the market is overdoing it.

At the same time, we’re all seeing how the dark clouds assemble above the otherwise sunny world economy. Geopolitics is getting complicated with North Korea’s saber-rattling, the China-US trading talks stalled, the US still stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran, Brexit with no deal.

It’s the kind of scenario in which conventional investors look for financial safe havens as they prepare for fiat currencies to plummet. Gold and silver are the usual choices. But it now seems that Bitcoin could pick up that role even if doubters and gainsayers (think Nouriel Roubini, the economist known as Dr. Doom) are still doubting and gainsaying.

Maybe Mr. Rubini bemoans now the evidence he’s left behind in the digital world that shows how wrong he’s was on last November when he tweeted that:

Is this just steam-release or a genuine take-off?

The market is rising spectacularly; there’s no doubt about that. It’s been green for more than a month, and BTC is just about to double in value in only five weeks. So the question now is: how authentic is the current bonanza? Is it just something of a market anomaly or the sign that the long-awaited crypto summer is here already? In the words of Peter Brandt (famous trader) is this a “lift-off in real or blow-off”?

There is a substantial fear that the current progress could have its origins in investors squaring their short positions. That could be enough to explain the current chart behavior, but the effect would dissolve as the price keeps rising. Stalling would be in the cards in that case.

Is consolidation around the corner?

Whatever the reason for the current market status is, a consolidation period is about to arrive.

Thomas Lee, of Fundstrat, evokes Bitcoin’s history to make us recall that good days in Bitcoin are not all that frequent. Bitcoin’s performance in a full year, he warns us, usually come down to the coin’s behavior in only ten critical days.

His tweet reads:

The New York Blockchain Week is about to start. And today (Monday) the mainstream media is bound to notice Bitcoin’s performance over the weekend and spill quite a bit of ink over it. So with all the additional attention, chances are that the current parabola is not done yet. But the consolidation is about to arrive anyway.

“Should we rename Blockchain Week to Bitcoin Week?” asked Tyler Winklevoss (hopefully, rhetorically) in his Twitter.

FOMO comes at 10k

And now the question is, when can we think that FOMO is here already?

Mr. Lee’s guess is at USD 10.000,00 “My SWAG [scientific wild-assed guess] is $10,000 is the price that causes FOMO from those who saw #bitcoin as dead forever.” It seems appropriate for the bunch of guys “who gloated about 90% crash” as Lee mentioned. But it’s already happening for some others.

Those who got a piece of the action but got scared off quickly can choose from a variety of mobile apps and get their hands on some BTC, BCH, ETH, LTC, ETC or XPR in a heartbeat.

A new US equity research paper that covers blockchain and cryptocurrencies authored by Canaccord Genuity (an investment bank) estimates 2021 to be the year in which Bitcoin could go back to its past peak value.

The choice of that price target is arbitrary, and it’s somehow meaningless except for one thing: it’s a high price which implies that analysts think that the new and long-awaited bullish run is here already.

The bank explains its posture on Bitcoin using the coin’s improved fundamentals as the basis for its conclusions. Transaction value, for instance, went from 478 million USD in February to 801 million USD as May started. The bank also notes that the new Segregated Witness (SegWit) soft fork in Bitcoin (which is a kind of upgrade for the network aiming to compensate for some of the protocol’s restrictions) is now being used by about 36% of the transactions thus improving overall network performance.

The rise of the altcoins

Bitcoin remains the market’s most important cryptocurrency, and that’s not going to change very soon or very quickly. It dominates the crypto verse at the tune of 58.7%, so it accounts for the majority of the activity in crypto. But some alternative currencies are becoming more relevant, and they shouldn’t be ignored.

Among those cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Cash is the one growing the most so far. Its success has to do with the failure of Bitcoin SV after both projects forked out (courtesy of Craig Wright) but also with the link it has with Bitcoin as a brand. It’s trading at USD 391,63 as we write this, which means it’s gone up by 10.38% for the last 24 hours.

Litecoin (LTC), created by former Google engineer Charlie Lee, is back into good form and it’s the second-best performer so far. It’s getting close to that all-important psychological USD 100,00 mark. The mark also happens to be the coin’s second Fibonacci resistance level for monthly trading so if it should reach it could take off. It currently trades with green numbers (4.30%) at USD 89.74.

Cardano is doing well too. Ranked at 10th by market capitalization is not the digital asset everybody is talking about but it gained 16% over the weekend and, today, it’s still trading in green at 5.85%.

Even Ethereum is doing well. It’s beyond USD 200 now and also in the green zone at 6.75%. This is an asset that’s lost a lot of appeal for many cryptonauts, but it is still the world’s second by market capitalization.

Of course, you should never ignore Ripple’s XRP. It’s the coin for all seasons as it was the market’s best performer in 2017 (year of wonders) and 2018 (year of the catastrophe). It’s not doing as well as most of the market, which is rare for XRP, but it’s still going up, trading at USD 0.327056.

Every coin in the top 20 is rising firmly.

And there’s even been room for some nearly miraculous behaviors. BuckHatCoin (BHIG), for instance, rendered 696% in a single day during the weekend.

So the crypto verse is doing great. Almost every coin is rising, and some of the ugly ducklings in the market are becoming beautiful swans, at least for the time being.

In short, the entire crypto market is on a roll, with Bitcoin and Ripple’s XRP leading the way among the top 20 at the time of writing this article (XRP is up by more than 19% in the last twenty-four hours). As things stand, it looks like the institutional money has entered the market, and it seems it’s merely the beginning. Consequently, the current Bitcoin rally looks real.

Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.

You won’t believe what will bring about the next Bitcoin (BTC) rally

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Now is the winter of our discontent…

Bitcoin’s winter has been rather long. It’s lasted more than 15 months now, and there’s no end in sight to the current bearish market that has made BTC prices by more than 85%. It’s been bitter, dramatic, controversial, disappointing. It’s also been an opportunity to buy cheap while you can.

Why do so? Because the winter will end at some point in the future. We couldn’t even try to guess when that will happen, but it will. BTC has had about five episodes like the current one, and it’s always come back with a vengeance, and we fully expect for that to happen again. The question is: how could that come about? What will trigger Bitcoin’s next big surge? One of the possible answers could take you by surprise

Loss of value

Bitcoin went as high as USD 17.000,00 USD on December 17th, 2017. And from then on, it’s been steadily going down with some irrelevant fluctuations. Its floor has been at USD 3,150 per token, so it’s at 15% of its highest historical value. Those are obviously disturbing news for traders and investors, even for hobbyists.

As stated before, things will improve sooner or later; we just don’t know when or how exactly. But one very unexpected possibility is that the world’s central banks (which are the banks that print money and direct each country’s monetary policy) could decide to buy Bitcoin en masse so they can diversify their wealth storage options and use BTC as digital gold.

In a recent podcast of AltFi, Crypto for Earthling, the research associate and research head at the prestigious London School of Economics (Garrick Hileman) said,

“The main use for bitcoin today is as digital gold,”

Garrick Hileman added,

“The question is though, who will be buying digital gold? If central banks start to accumulate bitcoin, that could be hugely impactful on bitcoin’s price.”

What’s a central bank, anyway?

The central banks of the world are national institutions (except for Europe, in which there is one single central bank for all the countries in the Eurozone) which set the underlying interest rates their currency will pay, they decide how much new money to put (or withdraw) in circulation.

They have power over insane amounts of means (the wealth), and some of them (such as the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, or the U.S Federal Reserve) are among the world’s most influential financial institutions.

For most central banks, the main priority is to keep inflation at bay at all costs, stimulate job creation, and keep the economy growing slowly but steadily (Japan is the exception in this as the country’s money because it’s probably the only place in the world in which deflation is common, which is terrible for the exportation business which accounts for most of its economy).

Central banks have a lot of money to spend. If only a handful of them really start buying cryptocurrencies (and whatever digital asset they could want, chances are they would have to buy BTC first and then exchange it) the demand and trade volume would increase dramatically. We’ll have to wait and see if this prospect becomes a reality.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.