Another active week in the Altcoin universe as Ethereum breaks through $1200 mark, Ripple takes a dip, PACCoin emerges from the shadows, Stellar rockets up in value, Binance stops registering new customers, and Tron breaks through from the lower ranks.
Tron Breaks through from the lower ranks
Tron (TRX) has been one of many cryptocurrencies that have experienced a massive influx of growth recently. On January 4th, the previously largely unknown cryptocurrency experienced a huge 136 percent growth. Tron has been trending hugely since December and has grown by over 2000 percent since then, it now stands at $0.20, making it the 9th largest cryptocurrency and increasing its market capitalization by a titanic amount. So what is Tron? Tron is a blockchain solution for monetizing a peer to peer entertainment content platform. The company is lead by Justin Sun who many believe to be “the next Jack Ma”, the founder and executive chairman of the Alibaba group.
Justin Sun has been very active on Twitter, posting about his potential partnerships with “giant companies” and noting that they will be “huge” soon. These tweets were put out on the 2nd of January and were followed up by another teasing tweet mentioning an upcoming “prestigious” partnership that will be announced next week. His successful hype building strategy has no doubt been a factor in the recent Tron price boom. Justin clearly believes in his product, and on the 31st of December, he predicted that Tron would burst into the top ten of all cryptocurrencies by 2018, which proved to be quite a conservative estimate as it managed to reach this goal within the first four days of the year. The future looks bright for Tron.
Binance stops registering new customers
The huge influx of new crypto traders has caused popular Chinese coin exchange Binance to suspend the registration of any new clients. According to Binance, they simply cannot handle the sheer multitude of traders and released a statement explaining their current situation
“Due to the overwhelming surge in popularity, Binance will have to temporarily disable new user registrations to allow for an infrastructure upgrade.”
They are not alone in their decision to halt the influx of new accounts, CEX.IO, Bittrex and other popular coin exchanges have also expressed the difficulty they are having with the recent flood of new traders entering into the market. Binance has been the most active cryptocurrency exchange in recent months, reportedly trading $2.8 billion worth of virtual currency daily. The Chinese exchange will now have to undergo a huge network upgrade in the near future to allow for the number of new entrants into the crypto world. They better get a move on, as a week in crypto oftentimes can seem like a lot longer!
Stellar rockets up in value over the New Year
Stellar has followed Tron this week and has shot into the top 10 of all cryptocurrencies. Stellar, like many of its crypto counterparts, is an open-source project that operates on a distributed, hybrid blockchain. The currency that powers the Stellar Network are Lumens (XLM), with an extremely fast transaction time of under five seconds that makes Bitcoin seem prehistoric. It has put in place an interest rate that is fixed at 1% a year. Stellar is targeted at large financial institutions and has already signed contracts with IBM and Deloitte.
Stellar has been a solid, decentralized currency for the past 3 years but over the New Year it experienced huge growth going from just over 20 cents to over $1 within 5 days, an incredibly progressive increase in value for any coin. The founder of Stellar: Jed McCaleb, also happens to be a co-founder of Ripple, a cryptocurrency that has also undergone a lot of growth this year. Over the past year, Stellar has risen from 0.2360 cents to a peak of 91 cents, representing an approximately 38,000% rise in value.
PACCoin emerges from the shadows
PACCoin, a largely unknown cryptocurrency, has recently announced a possible re-engineering of their project. Their previous endeavor into crypto was unimpressive, they boasted no whitepaper, a website that failed under heavy load and no real business plan to speak, selling initially on December 28th. Since then the PACCoin has gone from $0.000004 to a high of $0.000293, showcasing a price increase of over 7000%.
Aside from some discussions on forums here and there, and some marketing videos on Vimeo, their marketing seems to be a bit sparse and not extremely confidence inspiring. Up until recently, they had managed to pull themselves into the 54th position in the cryptocurrency ratings measured by market cap, pretty puzzling considering their mysterious marketing campaign.
Ripple takes a dip after false Coinbase rumors
Ripple has enjoyed a good run this year and has had even more popularity than it has experienced before. It started the year above the $2 mark and even climbed to a peak of $ 3.82 for a while, shoving Ethereum aside and taking the number 2 slot in the market cap leagues for cryptocurrencies. It was recently rumored that Ripple was headed for Coinbase and was soon to be among the select few Cryptocurrencies traded on the website.
After a statement came through from Coinbase that this was false, Ripple plunged by 20%, a large detriment for those speculating its arrival to the coin trading website. Brian Armstrong was responsible for shedding light on the subject and revealed that Coinbase has no plans to add any more coins and “Any statement to the contrary is untrue and not authorized by the company”.
Ethereum breaks through the $1200 mark
Ethereum, one of few Altcoins that shot up over new year, broke records left right and center as its shot up over $1000 and went on to climb steadily to $1200. Ethereum has shown everyone that it is truly the silver to Bitcoins gold, showcasing its stability and value.
If you were fortunate enough to have had the foresight to invest heavily into Ethereum before holidays, you’re no doubt returning to work now with a big smile and an even bigger wallet. I’m sure that investors involved are praying that it continues this upward trajectory, we’re just to have to wait and see what the future looks like for Ethereum
