Joe Crypto: Crypto Market Gets Animated
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The cryptocurrency market is a volatile place, which is why you can make fortunes and sometimes lose them in record time. That volatility is what keeps us coming back and this week we got an abject lesson in just how unpredictable, wonderful and downright weird the world of digital currency can get.
What is MonaCoin?
For a start, today’s winner is a proper oddball: MonaCoin. It’s a meme coin, just another Doge then, but for some reason we can’t quite figure out it has added 62.78% to its value in the last 24 hours.
Up to 90% of the users are based in Japan, it has been with us since 2014, is traded on five exchanges and you can use it in some physical stores and online outlets.
This could be a total flash in the pan or the start of a meme war. Incidentally, Dogecoin was one of the few losers in the last 24 hours, registering a 0.48% dip. In the top 100, there are literally six coins that lost money today, so it’s an exclusive club for all the wrong reasons.
XRP Bubble Won’t Burst
As for Ripple’s XRP, we’ve been waiting for this bizarre Ripple XRP bubble to burst. Well, there’s no sign of that yet and XRP added 61.33% to its coin price in the last 24 hours. It sat at $0.61 at 3pm, with a market cap of $24.3 billion. In just two days the market cap has blown up from $12.9 billion to $27.52.
This is like the good old days of crypto and a smart investment at the right time would have more than doubled your money. Of course, the sudden and insane surge came from the rumor that xRapid was ready for deployment.
Now Ripple has to make good on this and deliver more news soon, or it could stand to lose a lot of the goodwill that has come its way this week. Some of the cynics on social media have pointed out the XRP has done this before, failed to deliver and turned XRP into a cyclical pump and dump. I’m not quite that jaded just yet, but Ripple has had a boatload of bad news recently, this latest surge does feel slightly manufactured and it has to bring xRapid to the market.
Stellar Gets Its Buzz Back With Lightyear
XRP founder Jed McCaleb has clearly rediscovered his Midas touch this week, as Stellar Lumens has taken off after XRP like a greyhound. McCaleb left Ripple to focus on the Stellar Network and this week there was good news. Lightyear has acquired Chain and is set to change its name to Interstellar.
Effectively, Lightyear has hitched its wagon to Stellar and that looks to be a winning recipe for the crypto markets. It’s a serious blockchain company that works wiyth the likes of Visa, so this could give Stellar the winning edge in the payments processor war and that could mean it dwarfs XRP’s price in the end.
In the last 24 hours, Stellar has added 22.30% to its coin price and the market cap now sits at $4.75 billion. Can it keep climbing in the wake of XRP? It’s quite possible. XRP went wild this week, but they have to synch up at some point. Stellar hodlers would rather see their coins rocket in value to join XRP in the upper echelons, of course.
Cardano Just Can’t Stop
Cardano ADA has continued to defy the odds with another 18% spike and a new market cap of $2.3 billion. It’s one of the week’s standout stars and it’s starting to look like more than a growth spurt. As I’ve said before,confidence is everything with crypto and Cardano’s blockchain technology is starting to inspire belief.
Electroneum carried on the good work from yesterday after the launch of its ‘instant payment processor’. Another 15.12% rise in the market cap, while Rchain, Status and NEM all outperformed the market. Those are the short-term winners, but there is something bigger going on up top.
Watch Bitcoin Closely…
First, Bitcoin has gone through two big resistance points. It’s sitting at $6,740 and it’s starting to head towards the big one: $7,000. That could be a moment of reckoning, so watch Bitcoin closely as it could collapse or explode and nobody seems to know for sure.
Ethereum, too, has finally turned around and recorded an 18.11% boost in the last 24 hours. XRP streaked past Ether in the last 24 hours, but it would suit Vitalik Buterin if this was a short-lived arrangement. Ethereum could have turned the corner and some are predicting big gains, to make up for the pain Ether hodlers have gone through in recent times.
Whatever the case, it’s a welcome moment of relief for ether, which has taken an absolute hammering over the last few months while the new smart contract blockchains coming through have shown all the signs of taking over.
Can Ethereum Bounce Back?
Ethereum isn’t going down without a fight and the recent tech changes, including the Casper protocol, could breathe new life into Ethereum. Buterin is a fascinating character, too, and we like having him at the sharp end.
So, what will tomorrow bring? That’s the joy and the curse of crypto at the moment. Nobody knows…
The author is not currently invested in any digital currency.
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