Bitcoin is only $5,000 off from its all-time high and it’s taken the rest of the coins along for the ride. Including Chainlink, which has recently been dogged by Zeus Capital yet again.
It’s time for your Friday coin rundown. Let’s see what happened.
Here are your top ten coins.
Bitcoin
market cap $301,862,192,673
It’s difficult to tell what’s caused the bitcoin breakout at the tail end of 2020, but for my money it’s likely a confluence of different, sometimes tangentially related issues. For example, we can’t discount the pandemic and the side effect of economic insecurity that comes from governments printing money at historic levels. People who already have money will want that money to be worth something, so they’ll trade it in for gold or Bitcoin as a hedge against quantitative easing.
If that’s the case then there’s a looming correction that could be equal parts devastating and educational. What I don’t see this as being is the projected final takeoff for Bitcoin wherein it escalates itself as the world’s currency like a lot of Bitcoin true believers are hoping for.
Ethereum
market cap $53,759,362,711
I’ve said it before—whatever happens to Bitcoin generally filters down to affect the altcoins. Hence, you see Ethereum’s rise, and the rising tide that’s effected the boats of the majority of the (non-stablecoin) cryptocurrencies on this list. The price of gas rose from a little over $440 to a little over $470, mostly I’d say on the strength of Bitcoin’s bull run. You’ll note I said mostly, though. Gas still had some big news this week regarding their ETH 2.0 rollout.
The rollout finally has a date and it’s December 1.
Ethereum 2.0 is meant to become a self-sustaining financial ecosystem. The upgrade will bring many changes to computer world, It’s moving from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, which will create a passive income for ETH holders, but it’s also supposedly solving the scaling problem that grinds Ethereum programmers and decentralized applications to a halt.
I’m more of a believe it when I see it kind of guy.
Tether
market cap $17,751,736,522
There’s a growing contingent of global bankers, countries and central banks joining forces and getting ready to jump into crypto. China’s already there with their digital yuan. There’s an idea being floated around in official circles that suggests that government-oriented central bank distributed currencies (CBDC) could spell the swan-song for stablecoins like Tether.
And I would have to agree.
You see, a CBDC would be backed by a tangible asset—in the United States case it’d be USD—on a one-to-one basis. Tether isn’t. They regularly “print” digital coins by the million to distribute to people as functional virtual IOU’s. Their actual cash reserves are nowhere near the $14.4 billion presently fluctuating through the economy.
At least when you collected a CBDC, you’ll be getting your money’s worth.
XRP/Ripple
market cap $11,975,299,962
XRP, the company behind it Ripple, and its investors have been feeling the pain lately because banks haven’t been jumping on the wagon to use its cryptocurrency as a bridge.
Ripple’s CTO David Schwartz went on twitter earlier this week for a discussion with community members.
The gist of it if you’re not interested in shooting a link to a discussion full of oblique technicalities is that the banks have been avoid XRP due to a mix of regulatory uncertainty, last mile problems, and fear of reprisals from their existing partners. They’re also hesitant to adopt XRP because of the time it would take for the new program to gain enough forward momentum to offset the opportunity cost of staying with their present programs.
It also hurts the cause that PayPal didn’t include XRP in their basket of offered crypto earlier this year and they’re facing an intellectual property suit in Australia over their “PayID” branded payment standard.
Chainlink
market cap $5,019,244,087
Remember Zeus Capital? The firm that produced a document called The Chainlink Fraud Exposed back in July that suggested LINK was nothing more than a pump and dump scheme. They’re not going away. Actually, they’ve upped the ante to $100,000 for anyone who can shed light on the project’s ‘manipulative and illicit practices.’
$100 000 Reward Program for Provision of Information of Chainlink’s Manipulative and Illicit Practices. To participate, please fill out the following form – https://t.co/DGZ23Jbo8j or email us at info@zeus-capital.com
Full investigative report: https://t.co/pQiTGEIsNb pic.twitter.com/zyraA2J9OM
— Zeus Capital (@Zeus CapitalLLP) November 12, 2020
Zeus Capital is an asset management firm and they’re going so far as to prepare a class action lawsuit against Chainlink on the basis of alleged fraud and spreading misleading information about the authenticity of its partnerships.
Should be an interesting one to watch.
Bitcoin Cash
market cap $4,781,902,106
The news is that Bitcoin Cash is forking again on November 15th. That really shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise as they’ve been complaining since before summer. You can tell a lot about a coin by the people who run it, the same as you can tell a lot about a company by its people and the environment. In BCH’s case, this will be its second fork in three years, with two competing fork camps.
We needn’t get into the technical specifics between the two camps, because it’s enough to point out that more that Bitcoin Cash holders transferred more than $250 million to trading platforms ahead of the fork. Support from BCH nodes is split between 40% and 14% for the competing chains.
The hard fork will create two separate blockchains, called BCHABC and BCHN respectively. The BCHABC camp is rooting for implementing an 8% “tax” on mining block rewards for the core developing team. The BCHN camp doesn’t want that 8% tax.
Litecoin
market cap $4,289,820,958
A quick glance at the litecoin chart down below and you get an idea of what you’re in for this week. It’s up and not just slightly up, it’s got a side-saddle on the Bitcoin bull (generally like it always does) and is holding on for dear life.
Now this likely has something to do with the official announcement from Venezuela verifying through a Patria blog post what we’ve been talking about for the past few weeks—that they’re now going to be accepting LTC as part of their official remittances package on their National Remittances Platform.
Naturally, the Venezuelan government has already found itself on the shitlist of the United States government, which has accused it for using Bitcoin to evade sanctions. This response seems like a South American middle-finger to the hegemon.
I can get behind that.
Polkadot
market cap $4,175,286,898
Polkadot isn’t meant to be competitive with ethereum. It’s meant as a DeFi basis coin to be used to link coins together so they can both be used in the decentralized finance ecosystem. It’s a builder. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be people out there who will try to make Polkadot competitive, which is precisely what The MoonBeam project is trying to do.
They want to set up a parachain that emulates the Ethereum Virtual Machine environment, which would introduce Ethereum’s style functionality at a vastly reduced cost. The price of gas right now is in the $400 range, but the price of Polkadot is roughly $5. It’d be a sizeable coup, if it worked.
Normally developers on Polkadot and other interoperability projects need ot set up an entire blockchain to host their d’apps. But Polkadot’s substrate framework is intended to simplify this process, and not all D’apps need that level of control over their environment.
Regardless, the D’app scalability space is competitive, as multiple layer-one chains compete with Ethereum-native layer-two solutions.
Binance Coin
market cap: $4,126,990,153
China has a mixed relationship with crypto. Generally speaking, whenever China issues a crackdown on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies it’s a way for them to cause an artificial price dip, which they can buy into.
They issued a crackdown earlier this week, signalling a $300 million exodus of Bitcoin from Chinese exchange Huobi to international exchange Binance since November 11.
What does this mean for BNB? Possibly everything and possibly nothing. A new influx of cryptocurrency into the exchange could also translate into more people buying BNB from the exchange itself. But it does suggest a new cash infusion for the exchange, and naturally the coin’s fates are tied directly to those of the exchange.
Cardano
market cap $3,300,545,205
There’s been so much chatter about Bitcoin’s bull run and the questionable promise of decentralized finance that it almost seems like most people have actually forgotten about the functional utility of the blockchain tech underlying it.
To that effect, Cardano’s been busy applying their blockchain functionality to ensuring that the beef you get on your table has a digital paper trail leading from the farm to your plate. It’s called BeefChain and it’s probably the best use of blockchain technology because if there’s anything you want a trustless, immutable ledger for, it’s food security.
—Joseph Morton