Time For Bitcoin Bull Run?

Bitcoin is currently riding towards a three month low and has been sent downward in the past few days by fear surrounding a hack of a small exchange in Korea, along with sentiment from US government that ICOs will be labeled securities moving forward. BTC is the digital father of cryptocurrencies, and altcoins are swift to follow it’s price movements (Often with 10-20% greater amplitude than that of BTC).

While the SEC made their stance clear that initial coin offerings and tokens will be labeled securities(and thus face more stringent regulation), they were also clear that Bitcoin is not a security. BTC will remain a commodity and this is definitely positive news for. China has recently shown signs that the BTC ban may be repealed, which would be a tremendous boost of confidence to the Bitcoin markets. While the ICO environment may be uncertain in the coming months, Bitcoin should see a resurgence in market cap domination as well as price in the months to come. BTC is currently trading at $6,766 on Bittrex, Binance, and Coinbase.

The opinions expressed on Crypto Bull are in no way financial advice and are only opinions. We are not responsible for any losses incurred as a result of reading our blog.

Hot Altcoin 🔥Civic

Civic (CVC) is revolutionizing the idea of identity management by providing cross-platform, secure, and low-cost identity management services. The Civic platform is actually a blockchain of verified identities, and the ecosystem includes users, validators and service providers. Identity information(Name, Passport, SS, etc) can be uploaded to a user’s phone and secured with a fingerprint scan. This information will be stored only on the phone and can be referenced on the public blockchain through attestations. Validators(FI’s, governments, utility companies, etc) are tasked with ensuring the information put into the public blockchain is correct, by cross-checking with public references; and they are incentivized to do so by receiving CVC tokens in exchange.

CVC tokens are the utility token of the platform and will also be used by service providers(hotels, bankes, etc) as a means of purchasing access to the rights of the users' information. This system is a massive improvement from a cost perspective on a sector that is racking up higher costs for KYC (know your customer) processes. It also provides a fully decentralized mechanism of trust and confirmation, which is important given the vast scope of the recent equinox hack. Civic's team is backed by many years of experience from their C-level, all of whom have found great success with companies like Deloitte and RBS. They know how broken the current system is, and have been doing a great job to ensure Civic addresses these shortcomings.

The Civic app is already in open enrollment for users, and partnerships between validators and service providers are growing as well. As the team expands, if they can continue to gain adoption, CVC will become increasingly valuable given it’s strongly defined use case. CVC trades at just $0.41 USD on Huobi and Bittrex at the moment.

Civic Ecosystem, from https://www.civic.com/blog/staking-cvcs-token-behavior-model/

The opinions expressed on Crypto Bull are in no way financial advice and are only opinions. We are not responsible for any losses incurred as a result of reading our blog.

Top 3 Advantages of Litecoin versus Bitcoin

Litecoin has gained a lot of attention over the past year, and for good reason. The coin was created by former Google employee Charlie Lee in 2013 and was forked from the Bitcoin Core client. Lee is still at the helm and the Litecoin Foundation now features 6 full-time core developers and a large and growing community. LTC offers some prime advantages over BTC, and there is certainly much space for both of the coins in the future of the crypto world. Here are three key benefits of Litecoin:

1. Faster transaction confirmation time (4x faster than BTC) 
2. Increased storage efficiency due to scrypt usage in LTC proof-of-work algorithm  
3. More coins to reward miners (84mn to be distributed total compared to 21mn BTC). 

These factors make Litecoin an appealing transactional cryptocurrency, and hundreds of e-commerce stores have already adopted accepting payments in the form of LTC, including Overstock.com! Litecoin's website even lays out methods and instructions for merchants to easily implement LTC payment acceptance on their websites.

In the last month, 30% of total LTC purchased was in USD - with 50% of the total buys coming from Coinbase. This seems to be a good indicator that more people are discovering Litecoin, and it’s many benefits. After the coin has been beaten up in the bear market over the past few months, it is up 14% on the week and currently trades at $131.91 on popular cryptocurrency exchanges including Coinbase, Bittrex, and Binance.

Hot Altcoin 🔥 Lisk

LSK (Lisk) - LSK has been hit among the hardest over the last 30 days from a price movement perspective, but the ETH and BTC markets are starting to rally. Lisk's Sidechain Development Kit makes it easy for companies and developers to build their own blockchain. The tools are free for everyone, open source and written in JavaScript. Blockchain technology can provide tremendous value across a large span of industries from healthcare to supply chain management, but many companies do not have blockchain developers to build entire ecosystems from scratch. Lisk is aiming to make this process easier, much like Shopify has made deploying and operating e-commerce sites an easy and accessible process.

The LSK team announced today that they have officially released the beta version of their Core chain. Although altcoins have been hammered of late, Lisk is a project to keep an eye on. The success will depend on the adoption of teams deploying applications on the platform. If it is truly pain-free to deploy sidechains on the Lisk platform, then it certainly could have a bright future! Right now, LSK trades at $9.50 USD on Binance and Bittrex.

Photo from Lisk team twitter(@LiskHQ)

Top Reasons Ethereum is Prime for a Run

Over the past four months the cryptocurrency markets have been in a bear market, but let’s take a moment to put this in perspective. One year ago today, the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies was $25 billion USD, right now it is currently $245 billion USD - this is almost a 10x increase still. The run up in December was bound to come with a correction and no one is sure how long it will last, but here are some reasons that make Ethereum an enticing coin to hold right now.

Often times, people have referred to the market cap of Ethereum exceeding that of Bitcoin as ‘the flippening’, but this has not happened to date. When looking at the total market cap as a percentage of the entire market, we see some interesting divergences between Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Graph from coinmarketcap

ETH experienced a massive rise to a price of $390 USD in June of 2017, where it reached its closest to surpassing BTC as the largest market cap as a percentage of the entire market. Since that time, BTC continued to assert dominance in the market as it rose to a massive price peak of over $19,000 in December of 2017. Through April of 2018, ETH and BTC have both taken price hits, but the dominance in the market cap percentage has been rising for BTC, while it has been steadily decreasing for ETH. This is interesting considering the growing number of Ethereum dapps...

Ethereum dapps, which are many of the projects that you have seen ICO using ERC20 tokens, actually make up an astounding 85% of all crypto assets that have been issued under existing blockchains. All of these run on ETH as their ‘gas’ and rely on it to successfully operate, making Ethereum’s value crucial in the scope of smart contract projects. Because of Ethereum’s unique ability to cultivate and support deployment of crypto projects, it is in a great position to continue to thrive in this space. While there are cryptocurrencies that are building very similar functionality and even claim to have advantages over ETH, such as EOS and Cardano (ADA) - they have no working products at the moment. It will be important to keep an eye on projects like these, but ETH talks the talk and walks the walk.

While BTC is certainly the king of crypto today, ETH is the king of dapps. You can view all Ethereum projects, including 515 that are live and actively earning profits at State of the dapps. This increasing dapp support, along with the recent slide in market cap dominance, could be an indicator of an Ethereum run to come when the bear market subsides. ETH trades at $363 USD today on just about all crypto platforms such as Bittrex, Coinbase, Gemini and Binance.

The opinions expressed on Crypto Bull are in no way financial advice and are only opinions. We are not responsible for any losses incurred as a result of reading our blog.

Top 5 Altcoins to Watch in 2018

As Bitcoin is starting to show signs of life again, we wanted to highlight some Altcoins that could go big in 2018. It’s always important to know Altcoins often are associated with higher risk. Approach these with caution, but understand with higher risk comes higher reward. Here are 5 Altcoins that are positioned well for the future:

1. VEN (VeChain) - VeChain is looking to become the top distributed business ecosystem and is led by CEO Sunny Lu (former CIO of Louis Vuitton China). They are making a compelling case with a power lineup of confirmed partnerships that include PwC, Kuhne + Nagel (Massive Global Freight Company), BMW, and China Unicom. The team is offering varying levels of nodes to those who lock in large portions of VEN, which will enable higher staking bonuses of THOR (similar to NEO/GAS relationship). VEN trades at $3.83 on Binance and is starting to rally after getting beat up the past couple weeks.

2. NANO - NANO (formerly Raiblocks) saw a massive surge around the turn of the year, trading as high as $37 at one point. The price took a big hit with the recent bear market alongside a BitGrail exchange hack (which had nothing to do with NANO tech, but was the fault of an incompetent exchange operator). Recently, the price has been steadily rising and Twitch embraced NANO as a means of donating crypto to streamers on the Twitch platform. Thanks to it’s unique block lattice architecture, NANO already offers feeless, instantaneous transactions, as well as unlimited scalability, making it ideal for peer-to-peer payments. NANO trades at $11.77 on Binance, and offers an extremely diversified holding in block lattice technology that is starting to get the credit it deserves.

3. EOS - EOS is building a blockchain architecture that has the potential to scale to millions of transactions per second, eliminates user fees and allows for quick and easy deployment of decentralized applications. They have been running a unique year long ICO and will release their mainnet in the coming months. Projects such as Everipedia have committed to airdroping tokens that launch on the EOS network for free to those who hold EOS. Currently, EOS trades at $6.13 on Binance and Bithumb and it should be exciting to see how the mainet launch and future airdrops play out heading into June.

4. NEO - NEO has emerged as one of the strongest altcoins due to it’s committed team, large community and its strong positioning as the cryptocurrency of China. They have further solidified that positioning in China with the recent formation of the G3 alliance alongside ONT and ELA, and the country continues to show a strong commitment to innovations in the blockchain space. Holding NEO on Binance receives monthly GAS payouts, which you can calculate here. NEO trades at $91.32 at the moment on Binance and Kucoin.

5. XMR (Monero) - Monero is the leader in private and censorship-resistant transactions and has been for a few years. A team of researchers at Princeton recently found it to be the only truly untraceable coin. Moving towards the future of the space, XMR may prove to be immensely valuable to many who are looking to truly move in silence, and no other coin offers this at the moment(according to Princeton). XMR has a strong dev community and trades at $284 on Bittrex at the time being and is the strongest of the privacy coin holdings available.

The opinions expressed on Crypto Bull are in no way financial advice and are only opinions. We are not responsible for any losses incurred as a result of reading our blog.

Hot Coins 🔥 Bitcoin and IOTA

BTC (Bitcoin) - Bitcoin has taken a hit over the past few weeks as the bear market has creeped in, but this is not the end of the king. BTC is the staple cryptocurrency that has a devoted developer following, and proven effectiveness. Concerns over longer transaction times and higher fees will continue to subside as Lightning Network develops further, directly addressing these concerns in the process. Satoshi's vision is very much alive in Bitcoin and when the time comes for the next bull market, Bitcoin usually leads the surge ahead of Altcoins. It trades at $8,158 USD on Bittrex and Binance today.

IOTA (IOTA) - IOTA is a revolutionary, next generation public distributed ledger that utilizes a novel invention, called a “Tangle”, at its core. The Tangle is a new data structure based on a Directed Acyclic Graph. Three big advantages of IOTA are that it offers a network that is extremely scalable, has no fees, and is quantum-proof (something that is extremely valuable as we look towards the future of computing). Another aspect that has many excited is that transactions are self validating and do not require miners. IOTA is trading down at just $1.67 on Binance today and looks like a solid hold for the long term.

The opinions expressed on Crypto Bull are in no way financial advice and are only opinions. We are not responsible for any losses incurred as a result of reading our blog.

Hot Coins 🔥 Monero, Oyster Pearl & Wanchain

XMR (Monero) - Monero is a leading privacy cryptocurrency, XMR has been the leader in private and censorship-resistant transactions for a while and for good reason. Data privacy is of increasing importance in a world where our internet personas are ever tracked, followed and targeted. Monero is among the most reputable projects in the dev community and was recently found by a group of researchers at Princeton to be the only untraceable coin. Monero does not market heavily as most coins do, which should be considered a good thing. Although the market cap rank is 12th and the coin trades at $330 USD today on Bittrex, there is much room for growth in XMR.

PRL (Oyster Pearl) - Oyster Pearl is creating the future of website monetization and distributed storage, built on IOTA Tangle and Ethereum. Using smart contracts, revenue can be generated from online content by utilizing just a line of code in the front end in the website. Website visitors contribute a small portion of their CPU and GPU power to enable users' files to be stored on a decentralized and anonymous ledger - In return, the website owners get paid indirectly by the storage users and website visitors can enjoy an ad-free browsing experience. Test net A released this month and Test net B is releasing next month, with the main net set to go live in May. Oyster Pearl is a project that has a lot of potential, PRL ranks 213 from a market cap perspective and currently trades at just $1.18 USD on Kucoin and Cryptopia.

WAN (Wanchain) - Wanchain aims to build a distributed “bank”. Just as traditional banks are the infrastructure of the current financial framework, Wanchain seeks to build a new, distributed infrastructure of digital assets to form an improved and modern framework. It uses the latest cryptographic theories to build a non-proprietary cross-chain protocol and a distributed ledger that records both cross-chain and intra-chain transactions. Jack Lu leads the team as a former senior software architect of Xerox and Hewlett-Packard, and with strong experience in decentralized technologies as the builder of Factom. With the test net going live last week and the coin set to begin trading on major exchanges before Chinese New Year, WAN should hit exchanges at ~$2-5 USD and should continue to rise from there if they are able to deliver.

The opinions expressed on Crypto Bull are in no way financial advice and are only opinions. We are not responsible for any losses incurred as a result of reading our blog.

Hot Coins 🔥 EOS, Loopring & Power Ledger

EOS (EOS.IO) - EOS is building a network that introduces a blockchain architecture designed to enable vertical and horizontal scaling of decentralized applications. This will include accounts, authentication, databases, asynchronous communication and the scheduling of applications across multiple CPU cores and/or clusters. The resulting technology is a blockchain architecture that has the potential to scale to millions of transactions per second, eliminates user fees and allows for quick and easy deployment of decentralized applications. The team is announcing a VC partnership this week and also provides incentive to hold with the announcement that they will airdrop tokens that debut on the network into the wallets of EOS holders, beginning with Everipedia. This is a long term hold, as the 365 day crowdsale is still underway and the main net network going live this summer. EOS trades at $12.80 on Binance currently.

LRC (Loopring) - Loopring is not only a protocol but also a decentralized automated execution system that trades across the crypto-token exchanges, shielding users from counterparty risk and reducing the cost of trading. At the moment, Loopring is a project for a decentralized ERC20 token exchange. The first public blockchain is Ethereum, but other blockchains with smart contract capability, such as NEO and Qtum, will also be supported in a similar way in the future. Pooling the liquidity of cryptocurrencies is a topic of increasing importance as decentralized projects seek to move away from central exchanges. LRC is a similar project to ZRX and has taken a big dip lately, it trades as $1.01 on Binance today

POWR (Power Ledger) - Power Ledger is a distributed ledger for a distributed energy system. The Power Ledger Platform permits peer-to-peer energy trading by tracking the generation and consumption of all trading participants. It settles energy trades on pre-determined terms and conditions in near real-time. POWR is an ERC-20 token that will provide access to the network. Power Ledger is set to run all applications on a new smart city project, Fremantle. Fremantle will be built in Australia, using highly resilient, low-carbon and low-cost systems installed and connected through blockchain technology. POWR offers a targeted use case with a massive potential as we move towards a greener future, and trades at $1.04 on Bittrex and Binance..

The opinions expressed on Crypto Bull are in no way financial advice and are only opinions. We are not responsible for any losses incurred as a result of reading our blog.

Hot Coins 🔥 Tierion, 0x & Ethereum

Week of December 31st, 2017

TNT (Tierion) - Tierion is building a universal platform for data verification. Tierion works by creating a proof that links data to a transaction on a blockchain, which is called anchoring. Anyone with this proof can verify the data’s integrity and timestamp without relying on a 3rd party. This project has wide spread use cases such as Audit trails for business processes, document timestamping and IoT data collection and provenance. They already have a working product with pricing available on website, and have partnered with Microsoft and Phillips… With ~500mn circulating coins and a market cap rank of 169, it’s only a matter of time before the project is recognized, and is a good candidate to shoot into the top 100 marketcap rankings in the near term. Tierion trades at ~$0.18 USD on Binance at the moment.

ZRX (0x) - 0x is an open protocol for decentralized exchange on the Ethereum blockchain. It is intended to serve as a basic building block that may be combined with other protocols to drive increasingly sophisticated dApps. The token serves two main utilities: 1) to solve the coordination problem and drives network effects around liquidity, creating a feedback loop where early adopters of the protocol benefit from wider adoption, and 2) to be used for decentralized governance over 0x protocol's update mechanism. Decentralized exchanges will be hot moving forward in the space, and ZRX is a should be a solid pick up, it trades at ~$0.70 USD on Binance right now.

ETH (Ethereum) - Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring smart contract (scripting) functionality, which facilitates online contractual agreements. The value token of the Ethereum blockchain is called ether. It is listed under ETH and is used to pay for transaction fees and computational services on the Ethereum network. Ethereum is a top tier hold, the staple token issuing network, and thousands of dapps are already utilizing the network. As more people become educated in the cryptocurrency markets into 2018, the value of ETH will continue to rise, it trades at ~$715 USD on Bittrex as of today.

The opinions expressed on Crypto Bull are in no way financial advice and are only opinions. We are not responsible for any losses incurred as a result of reading our blog.

Hot Coins 🔥 Verge, Civic and Lisk

Week of December 24th, 2017

XVG (Verge) - Verge is a project that has been around since 2014 and aims to bring user privacy to the masses while keeping the original vision of Bitcoin alive by providing user privacy in a public ledger. Privacy enabling coins will be a crucial part of the cryptocurrency space moving towards the future.  Recently, Verge has seen a lot of deserved attention, with mentions from Forbes, Bloomberg and The Chicago Tribune; and it’s gaining more traction with further wallet improvements to be released in the near future. There is a strong developer community around the coin, and it trades at just $0.22 on Binance at the moment.

CVC (Civic) - Despite the benefits of privacy enabling cryptocurrencies, there is a large concern around Identity protection, and Civic is addressing this head on. Civic’s platform enables people to build a digital identification, and their unique product offering allows real-time authentication of identity data verified by Civic or a Civic Identity Partner, such as a government entity, financial institution, or employer.  Their development of an ecosystem that is designed to facilitate on-demand, secure, low-cost access to identity-verification services via the blockchain will prove to be of growing importance as our current world integrates with blockchain services. With just 347mn coins in circulation, and a current market cap ranking of 69, there is much room for growth in such a valuable project. CVC trades at $0.70 USD on Bittrex at the time being, and has seen steady growth over the last month.

LSK (Lisk) - Lisk is a decentralized network that is building towards enabling teams/developers to create, distribute and manage decentralized Blockchain applications by deploying their own sidechain linked to the Lisk network, including a custom token. It is unique because Lisk is written entirely in Javascript, allowing for a Blockchain framework which accelerates and simplifies development. Lisk has jumped over the past couple of weeks but is dipping a bit now, and with a rebrand and increased marketing efforts on the helm for 2018 - the future looks bright for Lisk! It trades at $17.90 USD on Binance currently.

The opinions expressed on Crypto Bull are in no way financial advice and are only opinions. We are not responsible for any losses incurred as a result of reading our blog.

Hot Coins 🔥 Monaco, Cindicator and REQ

Week of December 17th, 2017

MCO (Monaco) -  Monaco a project that is building a crypto debit card which will allow you to effectively use your cryptocurrency as fiat money. The team has partnered with VISA as a program manager, and is offering a means to exchange any currency at rates that are 1/8th the fees offered by banks. The MCO token must be held to utilize the Monaco card, and is offered as ‘cash-back’ incentive on a few card offerings, which is a strong utility compared to other projects.  MCO trades at $16 (USD) on Bittrex today and volume has picked up heavily in December for the token. Monaco has big potential, and is looking like a solid hold as the team continues to deliver on roadmap.

“Use Monaco app to send money without fees at perfect interbank rates. Your friends will receive it instantly and can access the funds immediately with their Monaco card.” -(mona.co)

CND (Cindicator) - Cindicator is a decentralized, community-driven infrastructure which provides updates and access to key trading information in real time. The information is provided by taking historical data and reviewing the performance of millions of analysts opinions- using the complex of statistical tools and machine-learning approaches  Often, arbitrage scenarios arise amongst cryptocurrency exchanges in the cryptocurrency and CND allows traders to immediately identify key info such as: ‘Bid on BTC/USD is higher on exchange A than ask on exchange B by 13.9%’   CND tokens allow you to access the app and are trading at just $0.03 (USD) on Binance at the moment. With a strong token utilitiy and a recent mention by the vastly followed Palm Beach Confidential team, momentum should continue here...

REQ (Request for Network) - Request for Network is a decentralized network which allows for anyone to request a payment (invoice) for which the recipient can effectively pay in a secured way. It is built on the Ethereum blockchain ledger and aims to be independent from other currencies, monetary policies, or technological choices, in order to build the most robust system possible. The project created an authentic ledger, allowing for complete transparency which is critical for public factions such as government. This may seem contrary to the narrative of cryptocurrencies being anonymous, but this provides a more realistic integration to the world as it operates today. Since hitting exchanges in October at $0.03 (USD), the token has rocketed 800+% and is trading at $0.28 on Binance today.

The opinions expressed on Crypto Bull are in no way financial advice and are only opinions. We are not responsible for any losses incurred as a result of reading our blog.