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 China has recently shown signs that the BTC ban may be repealed, which would be a tremendous boost of confidence to the Bitcoin markets.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.

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.

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.