February 2019; Looking back at 2018

CMC Feb 1 2019

February 1, 2019; Lets look back at Crypto in 2018.

Over the month of January the markets have slumped by about 35% from December's highs and investor confidence in the market has been rocked. As we enter February it's helpful remind investors that these kind of corrections are normal, and healthy in the cryptoscape. If you were a December investor last year (2018) you would have been looking at an average of 50-60% unrealized losses. This time however, for possibly the first time on record record, roughly 20% of the market hasn't fallen in unison with bitcoin, skeptics at one time, assumed this wouldn't be possible without the death of Bitcoin. Some contributing factors to this change are the increase in FIAT-ALT pairs and ALT-ALT trading pairs, coupled with an overall increased confidence in the alt-market. Private sector companies began announcing the release of their own tokens.


Historically, January has always been a tough month for crypto. To ease investors concerns, we take a brief look at what the top 8 crypto achieved since the lull of 2018.

Bitcoin (BTC)

News of the Lightning Network (LN) surfaced near the end of Q2 2018 and throughout the year we saw a new lease of life for Bitcoin. LN opened up possibilities that most investors and skeptics thought impossible. Companies began building real-time payment protocols and hardware for uses such as entry to exclusive clubs and regular car payments, (Lamborghini, aware of the media were one of the first to roll this out). Fin-tech employers in Singapore, China and Asia are signing up to trial new payment protocols. The LN solved the problem of transaction speed for repeat transactions between parties by keeping a private channel open and only charging a transaction fee once the channel closes. Unfortunately, it didn't resolve the fee issue with one off purchases (see Litecoin, below). Estimates of 100,000 USD seem fairly realistic for the year ahead year.


 The media is in uproar about the dip in bitcoin, but those that have been invested for long enough hold confident that we will see a 100,000 USD bitcoin by 2020. Bitcoin skeptics warned investors that the 45,000 USD all time high from December wouldn't end well for new investors.

Ethereum

Another solid year of developments for Ethereum and a plethora of dapps have been launched succefully al year, further cementing Ethereum's position as a digital asset. With the release of Plasma on the OMG network (Q4 2018), Ethereum is capable of handling 1million transactions per second.

NEO

Since 2017 NEO has been relentlessly moving up the ranks. 2018 was the year of mass recognition for this now 100,000,000,000 USD giant.
[insert news]

Litecoin (LTC)

Litecoin and its community-lead sibling, Vertcoin both saw gains over 500% and grew immensely in popularity almost immediately after the news of Lightening Network leaked. Vertcoin was one of the biggest gainers in 2018, rising from 4USD to and all time high of 150USD in 2018. Litecoin pushed 1200USD at all time high in December. By Q4 2018 Bitcoin, Litecoin and Vertcoin were re-branded by social media groups as the 'OTC's' meaning the 'Original Three xTC' and much of the hate toward Bitcoin now seems to only exist in a select few social corners. The wallets and mobile apps of the OTC's saw the updates that enabled them to transact in any of the currencies required. This mean that for the first time ever, Litecoin (with it's reasonable fees) could be used for one off payments for shopping in supermarkets requesting Bitcoin.  In order solve Bitcoin's one-off small purchases issues, the developers encouraged users to purchase one of the smaller Atomic-ready currencies, LTC & VTC.

Monero

2018 saw an unprecedented growth in the amount of crypto-affluent investors, who would rather remain anonymous and there has been a lot of press since Q4 2018, expressing concern for the dangers of that much money being held unaccountable. News that the U.S government is requesting information of any transaction over $1000 USD in value throughout 2018 has caused some turbulence in the price. Monero's market cap was just over $20 Billion in USD meaning a loss of nearly 50% since December. It not unusual for crypto to range this much, so this could be a great time to buy in, but the feeling around social media is that investing now might be risky move. Something something, be greedy when others are fearful?

ARK

ARK looks poised to push just above Monero, providing Monero doesn't recover and ARK continues producing great news.


OMG

Right from Omisego's launch days, rumors of them working with Ethereum's founder and key developers on the Plasma project attracted many fans of Ethereum to invest. Ethereum's Plasma protocol went live Q4 2018 pushing the value of OMG with it. The Omisego network has helped Ethereum reach a potential transaction capacity of 1 million per second.

Omg holders will soon get paid fees to enable transfers by staking their coins. Omisego network will handle financial activity worth billions of dollars and needs every single one of those transactions validated by the nodes/stakers on the network. Staking will require investors to lock up their OMG tokens, removing a large amount from the circulating supply, driving up demand

Stakers are paid a dividend of transactions fees so your tokens will be generating a return for you which is payable in any token you choose. This in itself makes the tokens very, very valuable. Staking begins early Q2 so that will be April. The plasma MVP is finished according to Joseph Poon and Vitalik Buterin, so it's just s matter of time. There will be a limited number of nodes available so I would guess you need to be in the top 5% of OMG holders. That would mean you'll need around 1000 OMG to own and stake your own node. But, if you have less than that you can join a staking pool. So in effect, anyone who wants to stake their tokens will be able to no matter how many/few they have, the difference is just in whether you will have your own node to stake or will join a staking pool with others. The staking pools will be provided by OMG in cooperation with some of their partners. Will you need to have a dedicated PC and high speed internet for staking or is there a way to put them in an official wallet and use a cloud service or something with fast internet for staking purposes? Asking as a guy that went from 150mbps to 25 last year when I moved lol. High speed would be a year or two out No specialized equipment necessary, but a constant connection to internet required or you can rent a VPS. Here's all the details;

 

CMC February 1 2018 (1 Year ago today)

Further reading Sources:

Bitcoin: Lightning Network
https://www.coindesk.com/little-bitcoin-lightning-project-has-two-big-implications/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network