Going Down! January 31 Price Analysis: Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple, Stellar, Litecoin, NEM, Cardano

Bitcoin resumes its bloodbath. The crash in cryptocurrencies resumed once again. Bitcoin even fell below $10,000 once again. This is a fall of more than 50% from the peak. The latest trigger seems to be the allegations against the cryptocurrency tether. Investors are worried that Tether is actually not backed by US dollar as was claimed by the developers of the cryptocurrency.

The problem is that if that happens, most of the investors would not trust the other cryptocurrencies as well. Owing to this very reason, it would be a losing situation for not just that particular cryptocurrency but the other cryptocurrencies which are legit as well. This is one of the main reasons why investors are not holding the cryptocurrencies as it would lead to another huge crash as well. This is leading to the price of not only Bitcoins to fall but the other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum as well as ripple are consistently falling as well.

Read More: Is Tether a scam cryptocurrency? ‘Scam token may be fueling Bitcoin’s rise, without this, Bitcoin price would collapse!

Bitcoin (BTC) has continued to slowly recover from its brutal 56% drop from the all time high in December. The cryptocurrencies market cap now stands at US$195 billion, with over US$3.5 billion traded over the past 24 hours.

A key feature of BTC is the predictable deflationary monetary supply, which is supported by a dedicated user base which will hold their assets for an extended period of time. This controlled supply suggests that as demand increases, price will respond accordingly. As we enter 2018, BTC and other cryptocurrencies are gaining a foothold in the world’s lexicon, while the importance of the innovative utility becomes more widely understood.

Missed the initial bitcoin wave? Try smaller cryptocurrencies like stellar and neo, says strategist Tom Lee

    • Other cryptocurrencies will gain value this year, marking the start of the “Great Crypto Rotation,” says Bitcoin Bull Tom Lee.
    • “The rotation we’re referring to is among the smaller alt-coins and the large platform tokens,” Lee says.
    • Other coins offer different functionalities.
    • But Lee still expects bitcoin to reach $25,000 by year end.

Bitcoin bull and Wall Street investor Tom Lee said this year is the beginning of the “Great Crypto Rotation.”

“We think 2018 is going to be a story about rotation,” Lee told CNBC on “Fast Money” Monday night. “But the rotation we’re referring to is among the smaller alt -coins and the large platform tokens.”

Lee, who is co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors and one of Wall Street’s earliest investors in bitcoin, points to alt-coins, or smaller coins with a market cap of less than $3 billion, that have rallied more than 300 percent in the last four years, as evidence of the crypto-rotation trend.

“That generally marks a peak and then we start to see rotation into large cap-quality tokens,” said Lee, who pointed out that in January 78 percent of small caps tokens rallied at least 300 percent in the last three months. “We’re starting to see this move into the top 10 tokens and that should actually help large caps rally.”

While bitcoin has been the market leader in digital currency, the popular cryptocurrency took a hit earlier this month when it lost more than a third of its value, plunging from its December high of $19,500 to less than $10,000. Meanwhile, other cryptocurrencies have done quite well during the same period.

Read More: Dotcom Bubble, Housing Bubble… Is the Cryptocurrency Bubble next? The future of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple

Alt-coin raiblocks, which has a market cap of less than $3 billion, is up nearly 600 percent. Other cryptocurrencies with higher market caps, including stellar, neo, ripple and ethereum, have also outperformed during the same period.

The rotation of cryptocurrencies allows investors who missed the initial wave of digital currency investment with bitcoin to invest in other digital currency assets, Lee said. And while bitcoin’s specialty is “digital gold,” other digital coins dive into the larger crypto market, offering other options, such as that of payment systems.

In a note Lee said his firm considers bitcoin’s fluctuating prices, “very healthy given the strength of the gains seen in 2017.”

Still, bitcoin’s value, Lee said, should reach $25,000 by the end of 2018.

Bitcoin was priced at more than $11,000 Thursday evening, where it has remained for more than a week.

Cryptocurrencies have been crashing lately

The values of Bitcoin, Ripple, and other cryptocurrencies have been crashing lately, but one analyst is predicting a huge rise ahead for Bitcoin—with a forecast for it to reach as high as $100,000 in 2018.

“Investors appear to be taking a breather from bitcoin for now and looking at alternative cryptocurrencies,” technology correspondent Arjun Kharpal said in a CNBC story.

Bitcoin BTC/USD

Bitcoin headed to $100,000 in 2018, says analyst who predicted last year’s price rise. Bitcoin could hit $100,000 in 2018, an analyst who correctly predicted the cryptocurrency’s rally at the start of last year told CNBC. Kay Van-Petersen, an analyst at Saxo Bank, said in December 2016 that bitcoin would reach $2,000 in 2017, a feat achieved in May. Van-Petersen now says bitcoin will be driven by a larger uptake of institutional investors and futures contracts.

There are individuals within the financial world who believe bitcoin will breach the $100,000 mark this year.Kerim Derhalli, CEO of investment app Invstr, said: “Bitcoin is the next logical stage of the information revolution. This time a year ago it was worth under a $1,000. I predict next year [2018] it could hit the $50,000 to $100,000 mark.

Read More: Bitcoin Price Prediction 2018: Can cryptocurrency hit $50,000 this year? (Forecast 2018)

“Bitcoin is something that has gone against the established government system and seems to be winning.”

Olga Feldmeier, CEO of Smart Valor, said: “it can easily go to $100,000 by the end of the next year [2018] and possibly even beyond.”

Nick Spanos, founder of Zap.org and the Bitcoin Centre NYC, said: “Bitcoin has a stellar year ahead [2018]. No matter how low bitcoin went in the past, it always climbed back at least a few times stronger.

“Bitcoin is now tested and proven to the market: more importantly, people now separate the Blockchain’s incredible abilities from outside issues, so bitcoin is gaining more solid confidence from users and outsiders as this understanding improves. These perceived downsides are being taken care of, while the upside for bitcoin is virtually limitless.”

Not everyone is so concerned about Bitcoin’s movement. John McAfee, famed for his role in creating the world’s first commercial antivirus software and a noted cryptocurrency follower, has doubled down on his prediction that Bitcoin could reach unparalleled heights in 2018: Jon MacAfee: “For you who are long term investors like myself: (those who allways make the most returns), BITCOIN is still the crypto giant. It is at a low price, and will never be cheaper. It will be ten times this price in 2018. Remember – it has the lowest circulating supply of any coin.

McAfee isn’t alone in his thoughts that Bitcoin’s price could go further, but some believe it’s because the bubble could go higher before catastrophically popping.

“I think we’re going to see bitcoin hitting the $60,000 mark, but I also think we’re going to see bitcoin hitting the $5,000 mark,” Julian Hosp, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur and founder co-founder of crypto firm TenX, told CNBC. “The question is though, ‘Which one is it going to hit first?’”

“The fact that this is our first global mania will make this the single most speculative bubble of our lifetimes,” Mike Novogratz, a billionaire that’s put 30 percent of his worth into cryptocurrency, told Fortune. “It wouldn’t be crazy if the crypto bubble hit $10 trillion, and that’s 20 times more than what it is today.”

Read More: A research claims 25% of Bitcoin users and 44% of Cryptocurrency transactions are associated with illegal trade

However, pointing to evidence that more people want to buy in, Bitcoin expert Spencer Bogart said that he could see the cryptocurrency hitting $50,000 over the coming year. An October poll by Harris showed two percent of Americans own Bitcoin but 19 percent said they are likely to buy over the next five years, representing a tenfold increase in market size.

“I think we’ll have to force price higher,” Bogart said in comments reported by the Daily Express. “If you think about the supply side of that equation, the majority of Bitcoin is again locked down with long terms holders. So there’s not a lot of supply available. And meanwhile, we have this new uptick on the retail side.”

Tom Lee Says BTC Will Hit $25,000 in 2018, Advises ‘Aggressive’ Buying At Market Low. Co-founder and Fundstat strategist Tom Lee predicted that Bitcoin (BTC) will hit $25,000 by the end of this year in an interview with CNBC today, Jan. 18. Lee had previously forecasted that BTC would only reach this mark by 2022. The Wall Street strategist told CNBC today that now by 2022 he sees BTC hitting the $125,000 mark.

Ethereum ETH/USD

Bitcoin will not survive but that does not mean the entire cryptocurrency craze is dead with useful cryptos like Ripple and Ethereum surpassing bitcoin, Benjamin Quinlan, chief executive officer and managing partner at Quinlan and Associates revealed. Speaking to Bloomberg, he said: “We think that various forms of cryptocurrencies will survive and will do very well. “We think that cryptocurrencies with potential applications and utilities such as ethereum or ether, smart contracts can be built on top of it, decentralised applications. “Bitcoin in its current form can’t do that.” “Other cryptocurrecnies have anonymity functions and privacy that far surpasses the level of bitcoin and some have transaction processing times that also surpass bitcoin.” Quinlan compared bitcoin to early social media platforms which were overtaken but newer, more functional sites. He said: “If we look at, and we drew an analogy and I’ve spoken about this before to our clients, it really is if you equate the blockchain technology to something like the internet. “You look at the underlying applications of it, social media is just one application of the internet whereas cryptocurrencies is just one application of the blockchain.

Vitalik Buterin believes that 2017 was “the year where hype in crypto…far exceeded the reality of what existing blockchain systems can offer.” (Source: “Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has left VC firm Fenbushi Capital,” TechCrunch, January 15, 2018.) But, Buterin expects that 2018 “will be the year of action.” All the ideas he and other developers have been working on—such as “scalability, Plasma, proof-of-stake, and privacy”—are going to “turn into real, live working code.” Buterin ended these comments to TechCrunch with a spine-tingling quote: “Everyone in the Ethereum space recognizes that the world is watching, and we are ready to deliver.”

Keep in mind that attempting to offer a short term prediction for the price of Ether is a difficult endeavor. For starters, the price of a single Ether is so volatile that it can lose 25% of its value in one day, only to regain it in the next. The most recent example is, 50 days ago was a bit under $300 and now is $1,200. But there was a lot of volatility in the last few weeks with Ethereum going to as low as $550 and back to $770, and now at $1,200 after it was for short time at $1,300. This volatility, as well as the novelty of this currency – Ethereum was started 2014 – drain technical analysis from any potency it might have in making Ethereum price predictions for 2018. Rendering any forecast suspicious at best. Therefore, all the following predictions take a long-term look at things.

Bitcoin Cash BCH/USD

Bitcoin price BOOST: Cryptocurrency ‘oracle’ says bitcoin cash is the FUTURE

BITCOIN may soon have to take a backseat to its offspring bitcoin cash, the ‘bitcoin oracle’ Vinny Lingham has said.

Bitcoin is by far the most well-known cryptocurrency, but it might soon have to compete with its offspring, bitcoin cash, Vinny Lingham, the CEO of Civic said.Speaking to CNBC, he said: “Personally when I look at bitcoin versus bitcoin cash.“Bitcoin and bitcoin cash actually they’re focusing on two completely separate markets right now.“These two products are serving different needs in a market.”

Lingham said he thought bitcoin cash would succeed over bitcoin because it has more functionality.He said: “The one need is global fast cheap payments with some tradeoffs and the other need is anti-fiat money where everyone can run a node to monitor and value their transactions.“When I look at it from a products standpoint I think the greater demand is for peer to peer cash than for digital gold.“But you know this is not something we will be certain of until a couple of years when this plays out.”

I think the greater demand is for peer to peer cash than for digital gold

Vinny Lingham

Bitcoin Cash Price Prediction 2018: Is it too late to buy Bitcoin Cash?

2017 was a big year for Bitcoin Cash. What will 2018 hold?

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) had an eventful year in 2017. It was created in August as fork of bitcoin, amidst a storm of controversy. It quickly beat back the doubters with strong growth and reached a high of over US$900 by the end of the month.

Then it slumped back down. But in November it quickly surged to around $2,000 as people jumped aboard following bitcoin’s Segwit2x controversy. Then the market readjusted and it slumped again.

It leapt again just before Christmas though. When CoinBase announced that it would be accepting Bitcoin Cash, prices jumped to a new all time high of over $4,000. As it entered the new year, BCH prices were riding at a relatively consistent $2,500.

Why Bitcoin Cash could keep going

It seems to have untapped demand

Since its creation Bitcoin Cash has ballooned with little encouragement. Wider available has always seen plenty of new users jump on board, with corresponding price rises. A quick look at its brief price history makes it easy to conclude that it still has room to grow.

It’s still nowhere near as widely available as bitcoin or Ethereum, so there’s the potential for more spikes as it’s picked up by additional exchanges and further opened to the market.

Traditionally it’s also tended to draw most of its new users from dissatisfied bitcoin buyers. This might continue until BTC resolves its problems with transaction times, and transaction fees.

It’s resilient and familiar

Each spike has added tens of millions to the Bitcoin Cash market cap. Despite the inevitable readjustments, it’s always stayed higher than it started. If you feel like Bitcoin Cash has more spikes in its future, it might be worth putting some money behind it.

It’s also very technologically familiar, functioning a lot like bitcoin other than a larger block size. This means some of the new bitcoin infrastructure, such as bitcoin ATMs, bitcoin EFTPOS cards and more, could make the switch to Bitcoin Cash relatively easily.

It’s well known and has major supporters

Bitcoin Cash has attracted some major supporters, especially in the form of dissatisfied bitcoin converts. For example, the founder and CEO of Bitcoin.com publicly announced that he was done with bitcoin and turning everything to Bitcoin Cash.

This growing support is likely to drive further growth of Bitcoin Cash as a valid payment method, and draw over more of the infrastructure that’s been getting behind bitcoin core.

Ripple XRP/USD: Ripple price: Is XRP the next bitcoin? How high could the price go?

RIPPLE’S price has skyrocketed over the past year, with some experts tipping XRP to catch up to bitcoin. But is Ripple the next bitcoin and how high could the price go?

Ripple’s XRP currency was trading at about $0.006 per token at the start of 2017, before a remarkable 12 months saw the cryptocurrency surge to an all time high of $3.84 on January 4 – an increase of nearly 64,000 percent.Ripple has since slipped back down to below $2, but its strong overall performance has fuelled speculation that it could soon compete with bitcoin (BTC) at the top of the crypto markets.A panel of cryptocurrency experts, brought together by Finder.com, predicted that Ripple will overtake Ethereum (ETH) to become the second biggest cryptocurrency by the end of the year.According to the panel’s forecasts, bitcoin will remain top dog, with a market cap of $597.95 billion, followed by Ripple at $460.00 billion.
Read More: Ripple price prediction 2018
The experts expect XRP be trading at $2.93 by February 1, increasing dramatically to $5.06 by December 31, 2018.But Fred Schebesta, Finder.com co-founder and one of the panel members, has warned the outlook might be bleaker for Ripple than his prediction suggests.Speaking to Express.co.uk, he said: “My market cap prediction around Ripple is that they can make more coins and this to me means that the market cap will go up.“However, this also means that they will burn coins at a fast rate. I’m actually not bullish on Ripple and have always thought it would crash. As it just did.”

IOTA / USD Price Prediction 2018

What is IOTA?

From Cryptocompare:

IOTA is an open-source distributed ledger protocol that goes ‘beyond blockchain’ through its core invention of the blockless ‘Tangle’.

The IOTA Tangle is a quantum-proof Directed Acyclic Graph, with no fees on transactions & no fixed limit on how many transactions can be confirmed per second in the network. Instead, throughput grows in conjunction with activity in the network; the more activity, the faster the network.

Unlike blockchain architecture, IOTA has no separation between users and validators; rather, validation is an intrinsic property of using the ledger, thus avoiding centralization.

IOTA is initially focused on serving as the backbone of the emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT). For a more in depth look at the technical design of IOTA read their https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf.

Over the past two months IOTA tokens suddenly became one of the most-talked about cryptocurrencies of 2017. CoinMarketCap estimates IOTA now has a market cap of more than $10 billion, which outranks more popular tokens such as monero, zcash and Neo in terms of global transactions and speculative value. Robert Bosch Venture Capital recently became the first VC firm to invest in IOTA.

IOTA is still considered an extremely young cryptocurrency in terms of technical development and adoption. Its white paper was first published in 2015. Then a group of volunteer developers ran a token generation event (before initial coin offerings became a hip trend) to raise around $500,000 and establish the nonprofit IOTA foundation in Germany. IOTA offers a radically different approach to cryptocurrency, one without miners or a traditional blockchain network. This solves two of bitcoin’s biggest pain points: Slow processing and high transaction fees.

Even beyond powering blockchain systems, miners have a very important role in a currency’s lifecycle: Miners create new tokens. Dollars are printed and tokens are usually mined with fancy software. New tokens compensate miners for lending their computing power to verify data. It’s like a food chain. How could a cryptocurrency work without this foundation?

“In IOTA, validation of others’ transactions is an intrinsic property of sending your own transaction,” IOTA co-founder David Sønstebø told International Business Times. “This means we get rid of miners entirely and instead have a completely democratized and decentralized network where everyone is an equal validator and user, thus no fee.”

IOTA’s creators already made lots of tokens, 2,779,530,283,277,761 tokens to be precise. So there’s no need for miners to make more of them. Every user pitches in a little bit of computing power to making sure data is correct and complete. Theoretically, there’s no need to line up and wait for a miner, who then deserves compensation for such heavy-lifting.

“The more users there are on the network, the more validation occurs, which is the number one bottleneck for blockchain architecture,” Sønstebø said. “Right now, during the bootstrap phase of the network, we have a coordinator which helps the network to grow and protect it against certain attacks.”

However, fast and free micropayments required a trade-off when it came to decentralization and security features. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab pointed out several serious flaws in this new cryptocurrency network. They took issue with the claim that IOTA doesn’t have any fees. “Most people wouldn’t be interested in buying a refrigerator operated by a hand crank, even if the advertisement said ‘No electricity required!’” the MIT report said.

Secondly, there are technical questions about the security of IOTA’s underlying algorithms and infrastructure. Right now the nonprofit’s central “coordinator” software facilitates most IOTA transactions, filling in the role miners play in the bitcoin or Ethereum network. The IOTA team plans to deactivate the central coordinator when more users organically take up the workload. But it is impossible to say if or how that would actually work when high transaction volumes flood the network.

Regardless, IOTA has more similarities with bitcoin than differences. Modest and rare fundraising campaigns support specific infrastructure projects, as opposed to trendy startups. Passionate volunteers help develop the technology because they believe in IOTA’s long-term potential. Such is the case with Ralf Rottmann, a serial entrepreneur who works with some of Germany’s largest brands implementing Internet of Things sensor networks. “IOTA is not another general purpose cryptocurrency. It has been designed for a very specific purpose,” Rottmann told IBT. “To serve as the low level backbone for Internet of Things applications and provide a means of exchanging value.”

The IOTA foundation is developing a global marketplace to tokenize the vast amounts of data collected by IoT devices. In the future, when high-tech products automate buying more eggs for your smart fridge when you run out, IOTA might be an ideal currency for those tiny payments. Companies like Microsoft and Deutsche Telekom are already experimenting with the bare bones of this system.

Whenever a new participant publicly declares interest in IOTA’s marketplace or network, token prices surge. IOTA tokens cost less than $0.50 in November, according to CoinMarketCap, then peaked at $5 a piece on December 20. It stands to reason that IOTA prices could continue to rise if the marketplace attracts more enterprise users.

“Our goal is to launch the marketplace at the end of 2018 ,” IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener told IBT. “We hope to have some of the first use cases run on the IOTA mainnet in 2018…we perceive IOTA as the backbone of many security applications that power the future of the Internet of Things, such as machine identities, supply chain tracking, health care and so on.”

Unlike other cryptocurrencies, like litecoin and monero, few IOTA users aspire to directly shop or pay for services with IOTA tokens. There are some traders who buy IOTA tokens for speculative value and quick profits. Yet huge swaths of the IOTA community are technologists coming to cryptocurrency from different fields. “Most of the community come from some sort of IoT background and really want to help IOTA become the backbone for the Internet of Things,” Rottmann said. “I know about lots of PoC [proof of concept] implementations which are being built as we speak.”

Cryptocurrency veterans often criticize IOTA by raising qualms about the network’s tokens. For example, crypto hedge fund manager and Coinbase alumni Lindia Xie wrote a blog post saying the IOTA team’s take on cryptographic hash functions raised several red flags.

Supporters hear that criticism and agree the token’s system still has many kinks to work out. Most IOTA supporters believe it will take a long time to perfect the token. In the meantime, volunteers are developing the network’s IoT backbone, including a global data marketplace and unique features for a variety of high-tech devices.

“IOTA is not just another cryptocurrency. IOTA tokens are deeply linked to the broader vision and promise of the technology,” Rottmann said. “IOTA wants to build a decentralized, independent, permission-less infrastructure for Internet of Things solutions. The tokens are just one required aspect to provide a means of exchanging value. Investing in IOTA tokens means that you believe in this broader vision.”

Litecoin LTC/USD

NEM XEM/USD

 

Cardano ADA/BTC

Stellar: There’s a new hottest cryptocurrency of 2018 so far

In the last few days, stellar rose into the ranks of the 10 largest digital currencies and was eighth largest on Tuesday.
Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap at $232 billion, has lost its upward momentum over the last two weeks.
Digital currency ethereum soars 17.5 percent Tuesday to an all-time high, while litecoin rallies 14 percent.

The hottest digital coin as 2018 kicks off is stellar, which has climbed more than 65 percent since Friday into the 10 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

By Tuesday, stellar had a market cap of $10 billion as the eighth-largest digital currency, according to CoinMarketCap. The digital coin traded 17.5 percent higher on the day near 56.4 cents, the website showed.

Stellar operates a network with the blockchain technology behind bitcoin. But unlike the popular digital currency, Stellar’s transactions settle in 2 to 5 seconds and allows users to quickly exchange government-backed currencies, such as turning U.S. dollars into euros, according to its website. Stellar’s coins are officially called lumens, or XLM.

Notably, IBM is using Stellar’s network to develop a cross-border payments system with some large banks. Consulting firm Deloitte is also a partner.

Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap at $232 billion, has lost its upward momentum over the last two weeks. The digital currency traded slightly higher Tuesday near $13,880, down 12 percent over the last week, according to Coinbase.

While bitcoin has grabbed the most attention over the last 12 months, briefly soaring about 1,900 percent, 2017 was the year of ripple on a percentage-change basis.

Ripple, or XRP, climbed 35,500 percent to $2.30 last year and into second place by market capitalization. The digital currency traded 2 percent higher Tuesday near $2.44, with a market cap of $94.65 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.

Like Stellar, Ripple’s focus is on payments. The San Francisco-based start-up is working with financial institutions in South Korea and Japan to use Ripple’s XRP coin.

The two companies also have the same founder: early cryptocurrency developer Jed McCaleb, who created the Mt.Gox bitcoin exchange. McCaleb left Ripple in 2013 and sold Mt.Gox in 2011 to Mark Karpeles, under whom the exchange suffered a massive hack and eventually filed for bankruptcy.

Today, McCaleb is focused on Stellar, whose website says it operates as a nonprofit and covers operating costs with some of its digital currency holdings and donations.

Meanwhile, ethereum soared 17.5 percent to an all-time high Tuesday of $908.12, according to CoinMarketCap. But the digital currency remained in third place by market cap.

Litecoin jumped 14 percent to $261, about $100 below its record high hit in mid-December, according to CoinMarketCap. Litecoin has a market cap of $14 billion as the sixth-largest digital currency.

Adam Webb is editor in Smartereum, blockchain and currency news, where he produces updates on Blockchain, Ethereum and other alternative cryptocurrencies.

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