This week we had a look at a few Altcoin related stories which caught our eye. A US soft drink company rides the blockchain bandwagon, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee sell off the last of his Litecoin, The SEC gets tough on crypto and Altcoins reach record highs before plummeting.
Companies ride the blockchain bandwagon
In the last week or so the press has been saturated with various stories of companies changing their names, doing so in a strange attempt to cash in on the current craze surrounding crypto and blockchain technology.
One of the companies in question has actually changed its name from Long Island Ice Tea Corp to The Long Island Blockchain corporation. Bizarrely, simply a change in name for this company saw it experience a massive 423% growth in its share prices. Long Island have not demonstrated any solid evidence that their business is headed towards a more Blockchain focused futures so the only influential factor here is literally just the change in name.
A company that have experienced similarly unusual growth are Future FinTech. Future Fintech announced in June that they had made the decision to change their name from “Skypeople Fruit Juice” to the aforementioned Future FinTech. Once again, this simply appears to be a change in name and there is absolutely no mention of Blockchain or anything Crypto related in their a presentation which they released to the company’s investors in November.
It appears to be a cheap way to temporarily raise share prices for the company. David Rudnick, the investor relations representative for Future FinTech, has yet to make any comment on the matter.
Litecoin Founder Charlie Lee says goodbye to his last bit of Litecoin
Due to what Charlie Lee has called a “conflict of interest, Charlie Lee has sold off all his remaining Litecoin. Charlie Lee founded Litecoin in 2011 and has spent the last few days getting rid of every last bit of Litecoin that he has ever claimed ownership of. The only remaining Litecoin on his possession are a few physical Litecoin which he is keeping as “collectibles”.
Charlie Lee has spoken about how he is occasionally accused of promoting Litecoin on his Twitter for his “personal benefit” as a Litecoin owner. Some people are even under the impression that Charlie Lee shorts Litecoin;
“Some people even think I short LTC (litecoin)!” he said. “So in a sense, it is conflict of interest for me to hold LTC and tweet about it because I have so much influence.”
The Litecoin founder has not disclosed how many of his tokens he sold and as it was only a fractional percentage of the daily trading which takes place on GDAX, it was never going to be an amount capable of crashing the market. Lee was also accused of the price manipulation of Bitcoin Cash following its release on Coinbase.
“Some people even think I’m pumping Bcash (bitcoin cash) for my personal benefit,” he said in the post on Reddit. “It seems like I just can’t win.”
SEC Gets Tough On Crypto
Former Chairman of the SEC, Harvey Pitt, has commented on the fact that some serious regulatory responses are coming next year for cryptocurrencies across the board; “There is activity on the horizon”. The recent crackdown on questionable cryptocurrencies will continue to feature as a task on the SECs list.
Harvey Pitt has spoke about the a large problem in a lot of cryptocurrency investments, which is the lack of education behind speculative Bitcoin or other Altcoin fanatics. Investments not backed by knowledge of the market are known to be a large sum of total investments made in cryptocurrency.
“Everyone else is investing in it, and the price seems to be going up,” Pitt said. “That’s a real problem because there’s a lack of education and knowledge on the part of many of the people who are actually doing the investing.”
Harvey Pitt has also talked about the fact that insider trading is a real possibility for certain cryptos, a worrying thought for those with large stakes invested.
Altcoin reach record highs before plummeting
One can only speculate as to what caused the radical rise and fall in value across all cryptocurrencies in the past week. It could have something to do with the aforementioned Charlie Lee selling all of his Litecoin, or perhaps it was the recent controversy surrounding Bitcoin Cash. On the other hand, the entrance of a second futures market may have been an influential factor in the markets current extreme volatility.
Moving on from theories, let’s talk numbers. Almost every altcoin experienced a massive dip over the weekend, before leveling out a bit to recover some value lost. Ripple was among the altcoins which experienced a bit of a price change recently, rising to an all-time high of $1.37 on the 22nd before dropping back down to a solid $1.04 which is a respectable growth.
IOTA rallied similarly and during the week hit a nice peak of $5.48, before dipping down and is now holding at about $3.50. Litecoin peaked similarly and spiked up to $375, eventually wiped out over the weekend and is now holding steady at the late $200 mark. Ethereum joined in on the fun too and held high at the $900 mark in the first part of the week. It had a drastic dip at $543 but has come back up to $750.
A week can seem like a year in cryptocurrency, short-term traders are always at the mercy of the markets wild price swings. You need nerves of steel to put large amounts of money i to crypto, traders and holders alike are defenseless against the wild price swings of the crypto market.
