Chinese Whales Are Using Tether to Invest in Bitcoin

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The gateway to one of the largest markets in the world has been closed since September 2017. In addition, Hong Kong is becoming increasingly regulated by the Chinese government cutting access to the crypto market fully. This makes investing into cryptocurrency troublesome, costly, and time consuming. Any investor currently looking to enter the market from China, must be quite wealthy and have the time to dedicated to it. Specifically, those wealthy investors are using the stablecoin, Tether.

Tether stablecoin

Regardless of the recent investigation by the New York Attorney General and change of service terms made by the Tether team, there seems to be an overwhelming amount of trust placed in the project as a whole. With a retracement currently happening in the market, investors globally seem to be fine with hedging into Tether to capture gains or trade for Bitcoin.

Chinese Whales are Utilizing Tether

Specifically, in China, Tether trades are up tremendously. The controversial stablecoin is surging as an investment tool for OTC whales to purchase Bitcoin and other top assets. This year alone in China, Tether volume is up over $10 billion before the mid of June. Last year the entire 2018 Tether trading volume amounted to only $7 billion in the same region.

For China, investors will begin their investment in the stablecoin Tether through domestic over the counter deals with brokers. The brokers or even just the investors will take their stablecoins to foreign markets overseas to exchange for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other top projects.

Bitcoin Accumulation

Due to this and Tether at all time highs in the region, we can expect Chinese investors to be accumulating Bitcoin at rapid rates. A statistic from Diar shows that 42% of Bitcoin wallets with over 200 BTC per wallet, have not shown movement since pre 2017 highs. Ironically, these wallets have all seen deposits meaning Bitcoin is being constantly accumulated by these heavy hands.

Over 55% of Bitcoins currently sit in wallets that have balances upwards of 200 coins – worth over $1Mn at any point in time within the last 11 months when the price of Bitcoin breached the $5k mark. And impressively, 1/3 of the Bitcoins that are sitting in these wallets, have never made an outgoing transaction, which, outside of exchange wallets could indicate either lost private keys, lowering real supply, or a very strong resolve by cryptocurrency believers. – Diar

Likewise, recent reports have keyed into the OTC market, stating that billionaires are looking to buy out up to 25% of the entire Bitcoin supply. Highly unlikely that this is even possible, but the sentiment of rich turning to digital assets is quite appealing for the market.

Combining this information with the on going Tariff trade wars going on between the US, China and multiple other countries, and you have a recipe for crypto dominance. Many professional traders in the space highly believe that given an economic recession, Bitcoin will surge in buyer confidence due to its natural hedge against the market portfolio. The traditional market has been on a rip upwards since 2008, which means a retracement should happen in the coming years.

US Sentiment

For the US, there has been a noticeable decrease in investors hedging into Tether after the debacle. Although, this could be due to multiple reasons such as an increase in available stablecoins, fake trading on exchanges, or change of reserve philosophy. Therefore, a clear correlation cannot be drawn at this point.

What is clear is the cynicism from the New York Attorney General and other congress members of the crypto Market. With every crypto mom, there seems to be 5 more naysayers ready to pull the plug anyway possible.

Moving forward, as Bitcoin dominance surges in the coming years and competition with a starving market heightens, anonymity may become worth more than originally anticipated.

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The Nasdaq Is Taking Over Crypto

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The volatile market has left investors clueless about what to truly expect next. No matter the market sentiment, Nasdaq is thinking long-term. With two recent large series B investments in early 2019, Nasdaq is solidifying its position on crypto. Let’s take a deep dive into what the Nasdaq is planning.

Nasdaq Venture not Nasdaq

To clarify, the investments are coming from the Nasdaq Venture and not the Nasdaq parent company. Nasdaq Venture is an investment arm of the parent company Nasdaq. The aim of the branch is to prioritize minority stake investments that range from less than $1 million to $10 million. Specifically, these investments include seed to late-stage venture rounds.

In reality, there is not a large barrier between the Nasdaq venture and the parent company’s array of clients. Therefore, we can assume that the Nasdaq is gearing up to take over the crypto market when the time comes.

“With the launch of our new venture investment program, we are reinforcing our focus on driving growth and innovation by evaluating, distributing, licensing and integrating disruptive technologies for the long-term benefit of our global clients,” said Adena Friedman, President and CEO, Nasdaq. “Investing in pioneering fintech firms, who are developing unique technologies, continues our history of being a platform and partner of choice for the most innovative companies in the world. In addition, through this program we plan to accelerate the pace of innovation to ensure our clients continue to benefit from the technologies that are reshaping the capital markets.” — Nasdaq News

The Venture officially launched in April 2017, but based on media releases the Venture unofficially started providing investments in late 2015. The first investments were in 4 firms: Chain, Stratumn, Digital Reasoning, and Hanweck. Let’s take a minute to go over each investment and the newer investments ErisX and Symbiont.

Chain Digital Securities

Chain

From an old 2015 article published by Forbes and written by Laura Shin, we can quickly find the first investment made. The Nasdaq Venture partnered with Visa, Citi, Fiserv, Telecom Orange and Capital One to invest $30 million into Chain. Right after the series B round, Chain also announced that former American Express CEO Jim Robinson III joined Chain’s Board of Directors. All companies involved were expected to meet twice per year in order to share developments, discuss distributive ledger solutions, and increase interoperability between companies.

Where is Chain Today?

Chain posted a medium post on September 10, 2018 that announced Chain was acquired by Lightyear which is a Stellar-focused company formed in late 2017 largely by the Stellar Development Foundation. After the acquisition, Lightyear changed their name to Interstellar.

Interstellar

Interstellar

Below is a brief summary of details from the medium post.

The merger brings Chain’s enterprise products and customer base to Stellar’s global public ledger, creating an end-to-end solution that will enable organizations to issue, exchange, and manage assets on a highly-scalable public network. Chain’s cloud ledger service, Sequence, will allow organizations to easily track assets as they move between private ledgers and the Stellar network.

Key facts:

Adam Ludwin, who is Chain’s CEO, will be Interstellar’s CEO

Jed McCaleb, who co-founded the Stellar Development Foundation and Lightyear, will be CTO of Interstellar

The Stellar Development Foundation, which develops the Stellar protocol and supports the open source community, remains independent

Digital Reasoning Ai computing

The second investment made twice by Nasdaq Venture is to an AI solution based company Digital Reasoning. Digital Reasoning focuses on expanding “human-centric” AI Solutions and enabling digital transformation for financial institutions. Nasdaq and Lemhi lead the $40 million dollar series D investment round in early 2016 along with Goldman Sachs and HCA.

“Digital Reasoning has built an unmatched track record of helping our customers solve their most challenging problems across industries with a leading enterprise cognitive computing platform and intelligent assistants for key customer use cases,” CEO Tim Estes said. “This latest funding round accelerates continued innovation by enabling us to implement state-of-the-art Deep Learning technology into all of our offerings, deliver the world’s leading holistic surveillance solution in partnership with Nasdaq, add talented team members to pursue life saving analytics in health care with HCA and others, and drive novel Data Science initiatives at the world’s most valuable companies.” –BanklessTimes

Where is Digital Reasoning today?

In 2018, Digital Reasoning accomplished multiple things: $30 million in funding, Forbes top 50 fin-Tech , Sell-side best technology award, and bridged into the health industry . In mid October 2018, Digital Reasoning’s AI initiatives impacted hospitals by satisfying their quadruple aim: enhance the patient experience, improve overall population health, reduce costs, and improve the work life of clinicians and staff.

Hanweck Analytics

Third on our list is Hanweck. This company is a leading provider of real-time risk analytics on global derivatives markets and data. Information on the investment is vague, but what is clear is Hanweck worked closely with the Nasdaq Venture upon launch in 2017. At the same time, Nasdaq’s Jean-Jacques Louis joined the Board of Directors of Hanweck.

The team has been growing remarkably fast in the disciplines of quantitative research, quantitative modeling, derivative trading, market making, and market focused risk analysis. There is a strong assumption that Hanweck is also providing data on digital assets. This will allow Nasdaq to offer derivatives for crypto assets.

In 2017 and 2018, Hanweck was named Best (small employer) Company to Work for in New York State out of 27 other candidates.

Hanweck is the leading provider of real-time risk analytics on global derivatives markets focusing on the large-scale risk problems of banks, broker/dealers, hedge funds, central counterparties and exchanges — where the number of instruments and positions number in the millions. Hanweck delivers its risk analytics as a real-time service — usually in the form of a data feed — dramatically simplifying integration with its customers’ risk architecture. — benzinga, Globe Newswire

Where is Hanweck Today?

Recently from January 8, 2019. The headline read, “Hanweck Listed in the Top 50 of Chartis: RiskTech100® 2019 Rankings”. This company is inspiring the globe through their analytic solutions.

Stratumn applications

Stratumn is one of the smaller investment made in June 2017. In total, the series round amounted to under $8 million. The round was lead by CNP, followed by Digital Currency Group and Nasdaq.

Stratumn, a Paris based start-up, was founded in 2015 and aims to help companies develop applications that want to utilize blockchain technology. To achieve this, Stratumn couples their Proof of Process (POP) and innovative cryptography in order to easily promote compliance, privacy, security, and trace-ability. Additionally, Stratumn seamlessly reduces operational costs and improves the customer experience.

“An investment in Stratumn was a natural development for us given the experimentation projects we have successfully executed with Richard and his team over the past year,” Jean-Jacques Louis, Nasdaq head of corporate strategy — Reuters

Where is Stratumn Today?

Currently, Stratumn is very busy building protocols and use-cases on their Github page. News wise, there is an article from August 2018 that discusses GDPR ( Global Data Protection Regulation) and how Stratumn is working to uphold these regulations through blockchain solutions.In our enterprise blockchains at Stratumn, stakeholders timestamp the hash of their data on a public blockchain, while putting only proofs of data as transactions on the blockchains. This allows the enterprise network to verify every transaction without exposing data.

ErisX Digital Asset Trading

Next on the list is a more recent investment ErisX. The Series B ended in December 2018 with an amount of almost $28 million. Investors included Fidelity, Nasdaq Venture and previous investors from the series A in October: TD Ameritrade, Valor Equity Partners, and Cboe Global Markets.

ErisX is an exchange based company that aims to improve digital asset trading for institutions and individuals.

With our in-depth experience of delivering and operating a fully regulated market place, ErisX is venturing into the digital asset space with a broad offering of both spot and futures contracts on one platform. ErisX is integrating digital asset products and technology into reliable, compliant, and robust capital markets workflows.

Starting with Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum (ETH) and Litecoin (LTC), the ErisX solution provides trading, deposits and withdrawals on a stable capital markets technology infrastructure. — ErisX

With the range of investors looking to jump on board in such a short-time span, crypto traders should be on the lookout for a new exchange to hit the market offering Spot Contracts and futures in mid to late 2019. Granted regulatory approval is provided, this exchange should become well know to large market markers.

Where is ErisX Today?

With the recent investments, there’s a short time for development. News on the ErisX website discusses two new board members, Joseph Lubin, founder of ConsenSys, and Cris Conde, financial technology entrepreneur that joined in early 2019.

“We are pleased to welcome Joseph and Chris to the ErisX Board,” said CEO Tom Chippas. “As two leaders in the digital asset space, ErisX will benefit from the unique perspectives they offer and the enthusiasm they bring to the space.” — BuisnessWire, Jessica Darmoni

Symbiont Solutions

Last on our list and most recent in the market is Symbiont. Recently in January 2019, Symbiont finished its series B round raking in $20 million from lead investor Nasdaq Venture followed mainly by Galaxy Digital, Citi, and Raptor Group. The funding round will further cement its lead as a global financial market provider in blockchain platforms.

“Closing this round of funding enables us to accelerate investments in our platform and team,” said Symbiont CEO and Co-founder Mark Smith. “Leveraging our financial markets and blockchain technology experience, our anchor partners like Vanguard, Lewis Ranieri, and Nasdaq will benefit from developing new distributed applications on Assembly, our enterprise blockchain and smart contract platform. Assembly provides the opportunity for new participants to enter the digital asset market and offers existing participants a superior infrastructure on which to build the future of financial markets.” — PRNewsWire

Symbiont’s website mentions multiple blockchain based solutions involving: mortgages, syndicated loans, Index Data, Private Equity & Crowdfunding, Corporate Debt, and Asset Digitization. For each listed solution, the website outlines the current problems relative to that market. Great things should come out of this company and enable Nasdaq to capitalize on even more industries.

Nasdaq on the Blockchain

Nasdaq is heavily invested into the digital asset, blockchain solution, data accumulation, market making and digital exchange industries. Anyone previously discounting digital assets and blockchain as reputable industries should reconsider such opinions. Some people may recall the saying, “Money talks.” Well, it is speaking pretty clearly about the future of the Nasdaq. The question is, who will listen?

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Project Updates in June

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With Q2 coming to an end in June, there are tons of project updates in June looking to finalize some quarterly ambitions. Most projects promised some type of upgrade, application, or listing per quarter in their roadmaps, but it seems Q3 is sneaking up on them fast. With the surge in market prices, most investors and speculators are not as concerned with the developments anymore. Regardless of your position on decentralization or trading, there is money to be made in the market surrounding certain updates.

Before Q2 ends, there are some great opportunities to grow your portfolio. The standard trading practice in crypto is buy the rumor and sell the news. Therefore, here is my list of the top rumors to lookout for before the Q3 torch is lit.

Note, nothing in this article should be taken as trading or investment advice. Do you own due diligence and research before putting your hard earned money into anything.

Cardano June Updates

First on the list is Caradno (ADA). ADA is one of the most highly anticipated and appreciated projects in the crypto space. Although, ADA’s greatest weakness seems to be providing what was projected in their roadmap time to time. Before the end of Q2 (June 30), we can hopefully expect two things to come to pass.

Cardano Roadmap Update

With Cardano being over a year old and in full development mode, it is time for the team to produce a new and obtainable roadmap. Known for not quite accomplishing every thing on the list, IOHK and Emurgo need to be mindful to not bite off more than they can chew. Traders should be mindful of Cardano as it approaches major updates and milestones on this new roadmap as the price can fluctuate quite rapidly.

Shelly Testnet June 15

Soon after the new proposed roadmap is released, the Shelly Testnet should be launching. Shelly, the newest mainnet project, will be rolled out in phases throughout the year. This means there should be multiple updates, protocols, peer reviews, and workshops beginning the process of completing the Cardano masterpiece. If you want some technical advice on the upcoming price action for this project, check out this article.

Zilliqa June updates

Zilliqa is another great project that has tons of anticipation and positive reinforcement from the community. To reflect, Zilliqa is one of the first public blockchains which aims to implement sharing and allow linear scaling as the blockchain naturally develops. This project currently has two big updates launching before the end of Q2 that crypto advocates should listen for.

ZILLIQA SMART CONTRACT RELEASE

First of the announcements is the release of smart contracts on top of the Zilliqua blockchain. The Zilliqua blockchain aims to solve scaling problems through sharding which more traditional blockchains struggle with. Although this is impressive, multiple top projects in the space now have scaling solutions which could be why Zilliqua has not been as prominent since its release. Besides stable competition, the project still has a massive following and huge potential.

With the upcoming release of smart contracts on top of the Scilla interpreter, the project is looking better than ever. Investors and speculators should expect some price movements surrounding this update. Most bag holders could try and trade the spread. The price changes can easily increase your bags if you are careful and know the price movements of this asset. Learn more about the upcoming smart contract release on this article here.

In addition to the smart contract release, the Zilliqa team has a scheduled Core Protocol Engagement update due before the end of Q2. This could happen at anytime in the month of June if it is not pushed back into Q3

NEO June Updates

NEO has been out of the news for a while, but we have to never count the China version of Ethereum completely out of the races. Unfortunately for this project, their main token based project that resides on top of their blockchain, Ontology, is planning to switch to a more proactive and developed chain in the coming months. With no plans being set in stone, we could see these movements change if NEO steps to up their game. Either way, there is one event coming up that market markets should be looking towards.

NEO MAINNET UPGRADE

On June 3rd at 9:00 am there will be a very important NEO mainnet upgrade. During this all mainnet nodes will upgrade to neo-cli v2.10.2 with an implemented dBFT 2.0 consensus algorithm. There will also be a network fee adjustment to improve system stability. Easy to say that this upgrade is very over due and could spark some life back into this decaying project.

June Crypto Events

There are multiple other crypto events, upgrades, and announcements happening around this space. Here is a list of three more you can research if you are interested. Remember, most of these listed above and below could result in high volatility in each respective asset. Keep that in mind if you are thinking of aggressively trading any of the assets mentioned.

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What is Next for Bitcoin

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Currently, Bitcoin is recovering after an extended bear market brought on by a surge in price throughout 2017 and into early 2018. Today the market is as strong as ever as we see a recovery from the lows skimming the $3,000 levels back to just shy of the $9,000 level as of June 2019.

Bitcoin has proven itself to be a resilient asset. It has withstood the test of time, failures, bear markets, severe retracements, numerous hacks, and political debauchery.

On the flipside, Bitcoin still has a long way to go before it is globally adopted as a useable currency for the masses. There are several projects heading these endeavors similar to the lightning network, sidechains, and other layer 2 protocols. Although, none have been enormously successful, the search continues for the golden nugget.

For this article, I want to dig into what are some of the current events surrounding Bitcoin, what is next for Bitcoin, and some ways you can profit from these scenarios.

Bitcoin Current Events

Currently, we are approaching the end of Q2 2019. Bitcoin has been recovering out of the 2018 bear market and finally is breaking ground slowly approaching the psychological $10,000 levels. If Bitcoin can breach this level, we should see a shift in the market even more. Currently, the price of Bitcoin is hovering between $8,000 and $9,000, but we all know that changes fast.

This is not as important as the current adoption that has been happening globally. Microsoft, as silly as this is, will add the Bitcoin symbol to their upcoming Excel sheets which ironically is big news. Bitcoin is now an icon if anything.

Reaching as it may, that is far from the only bullish new surrounding the current market standings. The SEC has been continually dragging their feet intentionally to slow the pace of this emerging asset class. No one truly knows why, but it could be assumed that is has a strong correlation with bank relationships, high authority influence, and a personal view effecting them from doing their job properly. Regardless of the true reason, they can not hold out for long.

There is an increase in speculation of Bakkt finally launching their platform. Additionally, Binance will be launching their margin trading which should excite the day traders. In addition, the current surge in BTC price is leading new money to enter the market, which will ultimately continue to solidify cryptocurrency as a reputable asset class.

What is Next For Bitcoin

Bitcoin has lived many lives, had many developers, and gone through many changes. The Bitcoin core team is a strong group of dedicated programmers paving the way of the future. What could be next then for Bitcoin? To put it easily, no one really knows. Any advancement or change in the coding must be agreed upon by all of the miners and governing bodies. This decentralized asset must also be updated fundamentally in a decentralized way which can make things difficult.

Difficult might be a strong word to use here, as it is more like complex. Typically, when a new update comes out there can tend to be some disagreements. Historically this has lead to the creation of Bitcoin Cash lead by Roger Ver which now ultimately lead to Bitcoin SV lead by his highness princess Craig Wright.

With such extremes, it is hard to pinpoint what will come next for the grandfather BTC. We can assume a few things though. Bitcoin will need to have side chain or some sort of efficient and adopted layer 2 protocol to effectively be used as a payment system. There are several solutions to this already in play like the Lightning network, but there is work to be done.

Moving further into the use cases and development of BTC, we will start to see changes become harder to make. The mining pool will start to get even more cluttered, and any changes to the core protocol will become more complex as we grow as an industry. As larger companies start to dip their toes into the waters, they too will want to have a vote at the poll. A decentralized currency for all, could end up becoming a decentralized currency from all if there are too many cooks in the kitchen.

Ways To Profit off of Bitcoin

As things continue to heat up over development, market sentiment, and adoption, are there ways to make money? Clearly, the answer is a resounding yes. There are countless way to profit off of Bitcoin. Some of these way include:

  1. Day Trade the currency
  2. Hold the currency long-term
  3. Build a business model around selling or buying Bitcoin (Broker)
  4. Enable Bitcoin payments for your business
  5. Develop an app or product that utilizes Bitcoin for a solution
  6. Build a Bitcoin Gateway and market it
  7. Build or sell wallets for Bitcoin to be stored in
  8. Educated people on Bitcoin by offering classes for sale
  9. Write about Bitcoin online and build your audience to monetize products
  10. Build a product that manages trades or enables users to make smarter trades
  11. Develop trading bots and algorithms for better tracking the price of Bitcoin
  12. Become a custodian
  13. Offer options, derivatives or futures as a company
  14. Become a dealer for Cryptocurrency
  15. Learn enough to be a Professional on Bitcoin and consult companies in this space
  16. Become a niche investor for Bitcoin based companies or startups (Venture Capitalist)
  17. If you are a lawyer, specialize on digital assets and SEC regulations
  18. Offer headhunter services if you have the network

This is just a quick list of all the ways you can profit off of Bitcoin, or the market surrounding Bitcoin. Like I mentioned, there are countless way and the list could go on and on. Find where your talents or situation fits into the market, and capitalize on the market while it is still young. Lay your claim to crypto, Bitcoin and blockchain.

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Useful List of Places to Trade and Learn About Cryptocurrency

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If you are new to the crypto market or if you are a veteran forged through continuous corrections and bull runs, there are a few sites we should discuss. In this article I want to lead you to the best places for cryptocurrency to obtain all the information you will need. Utilizing these websites properly will help you make better decisions, save time, and eventually could lead you to a nice ROI.

Before we get into it, please remember the crypto market is a dangerous, volatile and unforgiving place. Invest with caution and remember that money is not everything in life! Only invest what you can lose. Nothing should be considered financial advice on the internet either, including this blog.

Additionally, always strive to stay positive and learn from your mistakes when investing. Every trader does and will make mistakes at some point. It is those who keep a level head, evaluate the situation and improve that will come out on top. Stay confident in yourself because of your due diligence, effort, and passion. With that being said, let’s get into my list of best places for cryptocurrency.

Best Places for Cryptocurrency Investors

Top News on Crypto Panic

First on the list is a personal favorite, CryptoPanic or CP for short. CP launched in early 2018 and since then has become a tool that I personally utilize daily. If you are new to the market, it may seem slightly overwhelming at first. Once you are familiar with names, projects, assets and trends, this website will save you countless hours of research daily.

Why does CryptoPanic save you hours of research daily? Simply, CP pulls all of the most top rated sources across the crypto industry into one news feed. This means all of the best articles from over 50 sources are aggregated daily through the top news feed. What is even better, the readers and users on CP get to vote on their favorite articles, news, and announcements. Since CP users have a wide and deep knowledge base in the crypto market, they will quickly weed out the bad articles from the good articles and leave you with a list of the 7 most important articles across the market at that time.

If you were to try and scour 50 sites a day, read potentially hundreds of articles and then score each one on market impact, you would run out of hours in the day. CryptoPanic makes this problem disappear. Moreover, there are polls which anyone can create, discussions on top articles for deeper understanding, and constant improvements to the platform. Easy to say, CP is a must for anyone entering, researching, or speculating on cryptocurrency.

Research on Coin Market Cap

One of the oldest and most well known websites on the market is Coin Market Cap or CMC for short. This site has been around for over 6 years and continues to be the most used and reliable site. simply, go onto the site to check your favorite coin’s price movements, social media posts, and see what coins are trending in the market that day.

Lately, the site has been going through some renovations in late 2018 and throughout 2019. They are adding new features like blogs and top news on the market. The bad part is this news is static and the community does not really have a chance to vote or discuss the news as needed. Additionally, there have been problems in the past with the ranking of exchanges by volume.

In 2018, there were multiple reports of exchanges posting fake volume in order to increase their ranking, bait in traders, and capitalize on the market. Many of the Asian exchanges were found guilty of this and have since been penalized on rankings. In addition, CMC now offers rankings with adjusted volume levels.

Specifically, how do you use this site properly? Quickly compare multiple projects and coins by researching and looking at important factors like:

  • Number of liquidity pairings
  • Number of exchange listings
  • Social activity
  • Transaction and trade volume
  • Circulating supply and total supply
  • Historical highs and lows
  • Similar projects

All of these things can be found on each project page along with additional information. These are basic things to look at and compare before investing in any project. Use CMC as your tool to make smart investments. For these reasons, Coin Market Cap is one of the best places for cryptocurrency investors to research.

Cryptocurrency Videos on YouTube

Like most things in this world, YouTube has a heavily dedicated list of crypto advocates. Each crypto Youtuber will slightly cater to different audiences, but there are some very important things to consider before dedicating your time to learning from one of these presenters.

Before you commit yourself to following a specific channel, think about what it is that you want. If you are a Hodler in the market which means you bought your assets and you are in a long position with no thoughts of short selling, then you may just want entertainment. There are multiple Youtubers that focus on entertaining the masses while giving the news. A popular channel is CryptoDaily.

If you are more concerned about the tech side of the market like blockchain, company specifics, hacks and forks, then you may want to follow Ivan on Tech. Although some people love drama and a good conspiracy, if that is you then you should definitely check out the Crypto Lark.

Regardless of who you watch, make sure the content you are consuming fits your needs. Additionally, they should not be trying to pressure you to buy or sell, shill you projects, or manipulate your mind about your investment. You should watch a video and walk away with a feeling of time well spent. If you are not satisfied with any of the YouTubers listed above, do some research and find one that best fits you!

trade on Binance Exchange

Clearly, if you are going to invest into a volatile and dangerous market you will need a good exchange to trade. Binance is the best exchange on the market by far. Even in the event of security breach, they have an impeccable record of protecting user funds, and reimbursing users funds that are lost, stolen externally or hacked internally.

Investors and traders on Binance can feel a certain sense of security when using a dependable platform. Specifically, the CEO, CZ, is driven to further the industry through all means of cooperation, innovation and resilience.

Furthermore, Binance hosts some of the cheapest trading fees on the entire market. Holders of their native BNB token will save even more when trading on the exchange through a BNB fee payment system built into the exchange. Aside from savings on constant fees, every top crypto has a stable coin pairing which enables you to capture gains consistently and without worry.

Another great feature of this exchange is the accessibility to hundreds of assets all in one place. Moving through 2019 the exchange will also enable margin trading for more gains to be made, continue building on their own blockchain, and push the boundaries of the industry.

Manage Trades on 3 commas

A lesser known website, 3 Commas (3C) is a must have for investors. Why is it a must have? In short, you can take your Binance account from above and use the API through the 3 Commas platform. This enables you to pend conditional orders which is something you can not typically do on the Binance platform.

For instance, on 3C you can not only set your stop limits for assets, but also enable purchases after those stop limits are triggered. Let us think of it like this. You have $10,000 in Bitcoin on Binance. You would create an account on 3C, and link the accounts through the Binance API. Then, you can manage your trading from 3C without having to log onto the Binance account.

Now, assume you suspect Bitcoin to go through a correction, but you do not want to ride the correction. You would rather capture your gains at a certain percentage retracement and then re-enter on the recovery. On 3C, you can do just that. Hypothetically, you could set your stop limit at 3%, and then set a buy back order for when the market stops dipping and increases by 1%. Thus, if the market dipped 10% here would be the result.

  • Initial $10,000 in Bitcoin
  • Market dips 3% and stop limit is triggers through 3C. You sell your Bitcoins at $9,700. Bitcoin continues to dip the full 10% to $9,000.
  • Once the dip reached $9,000, the price of Bitcoin begins to recover.
  • Since you set a buy back order through 3C, now you automatically purchase bitcoin again at the price of $9,090 due to your 1% increase setting.
  • Thus, you actually will gain Bitcoin over the process of this correction in the market over time instead of losing 10% of your portfolio. Essentially you are making a spread.

Here is a Excel chart for another representation of the benefits of using 3 commas properly:


I highly recommend everyone get a 3 commas account the same time you sign up for your Binance account.

Trade on SFOX

SFOX is an amazing tool for traders. Specifically, SFOX provides traders and institutions with over 20 liquidity partners, verifiably secure processes, insurance up to $250 thousand, and first class customer service. This platform is not for the average investor, but if you are a day trader or simply a passionate trader looking to developer your skills, utilize this tool.

The business developer of SFOX participated in a complete interview with me recently. Everything on that interview is in this article. Additionally, there are tons of benefits to using a dealer like SFOX. For instance, instead of moving assets exchange to exchange to capitalize on arbitrage, trading pairs, and different assets, you can do it all on SFOX. Another great feature that makes it stand out above its competitors is the user friendly interface. Make sure to check out this platform if you are considering becoming a trader.

Cryptochill Bitcoin Payment Gateway

The above websites and platforms cater to the average investor with the exception of SFOX. This section aims to please the brokers, exchanges, and merchants. If you need to really transact some Bitcoin and move some serious cash, you may need a Bitcoin Payment Gateway. Specifically, one company in particular makes a point to cater to the client and provide every available solution on the market. That company is CryptoChill or CC for short.

This is a very niche part of the market, but as a merchant you may also want to implement a simple pay with Bitcoin button on your website. You can do this easily with Cryptochill and manage invoices, adjust confirmation acceptance, and review transactions all on the CryptoChill dashboard. Likewise, brokers and exchanges can build and customize their gateway with no gap limits, negotiable fees and constant support.

Although 99% of crypto advocates will not need a Bitcoin Gateway, it is important for the 1% that does to find one that will take care of you. Additionally, CC has security at the forefront of their development process. Exchanges, brokers, and merchants can rest assure that their transactions are safe and easily accessible at all times.

List of Best websites For Crypto

This is a short, but impactful list. If you are trading, entering, speculating, running a company, managing transactions, writing blogs, researching, living on the moon, or saving for retirement. These sites will help you navigate the waters of crypto. Make sure to utilize them properly to fully optimize your chances for success in this market.

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How Are Cryptocurrency and Forex similar

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Do the Forex and cryptocurrency markets have anything in common? While both terms may sound different and the markets are separate, they still have many overlapping characteristics. In this article, we will cover how cryptocurrency and Forex work similarly. In particular, we will start with a brief over view of what Forex actually is, what is traded and how it operates. Afterward, we will get into the similarities and strategies associated with both markets. With that being said, let’s get right to it.

What Is Forex?

The FM market or Forex is the largest platform for trading in the globe with 5.1 trillion dollars being exchanged everyday. This is a large amount of wealth being shifted daily. For instance, the USA stock market trades approximately $257 billion every day. This is a fraction of the amount of what Forex produces on a day-to-day trade volume.

Additionally, foreign exchanges operate for five days out of the week and for twenty-four hours a day on those days. For instance, Forex trades are always in operation with the help of individuals and banks across the globe. For Forex, you will not find any central market as it is not directly associated with any other financial platforms. There are currency trades taking place on any market opening which might sound familiar to some crypto traders.

How Does Foreign Exchange Trade Operate?

With foreign exchange trade, you will have to buy a currency and later sell for another. Marketing and buying currencies will help you see more profits in Forex. Specifically, It has to do with speculating over how currencies will behave in the market. The speculation you set on in Forex can either be for futures or current value. Here is a list of some of the major currencies offered on the Forex Market.

The Major Currencies Of The Forex Market

SymbolNation
CFHSwitzerland
GBPGreat Britain
USDUnited States
JPYJapan
EUREurozone
CADCanada
AUDAustralia
NZDNew Zealand

Trading Currency Pairs

The real Forex market is a product of the major currency pairs. Although, the minor currency pairs can also help traders make a profit. The combination of other larger currency trades can also be the product of the minors. It can be in JPY/GBP, CHF/EUR, and GBP/EUR. The one big question that comes to mind is selecting the best currencies to trade.

The best way to go is by concentrating your trade on two or one currency pairs. It is perfect for anyone new to the Forex market. In most cases, the JPY/USD or USD/EUR happens to be the choice of traders. It is because these economies have enough resources and information available to traders. The truth is that these pairs happened to be the main volume of global trade on Forex due to trader preferences. Besides preferences, the hours of operation are very important to consider before trading.

International Market Hours For Forex Trading

Forex trading will always open around 9 pm on Sunday and close 20 GMT by Friday. During Forex hours, traders have the opportunity to trade, sell, and buy currencies. Asia, America and the Pacific will open markets at GMT to promote a fair and standardized market timing. Frankfurt opens the Forex market at 7 am from Monday through Friday. In London, the Forex market opens at 8 am. Access to the Forex platform is possible once the markets are open from multiple sources online or through brokers and exchanges. In similar fashion, the cryptocurrency market is up 24/7, but open for all 7 days of the week instead of the limited 5 days for Forex.

The Comprehensive Details Of Cryptocurrency

Besides the up time, cryptocurrency similarly remains a digital currency without any central point of operation. For instance, It means that the system behind cryptocurrency obeys a complex decentralization policy derived from its coding architecture. In addition, cryptocurrency doesn’t work with central bank’s regulations like fiat currencies do on Forex. Instead, this digital currency can operate freely on simple speculations, investing and trading.

Cryptocurrencies That Are Popular To Traditional Investors

Bitcoin – Bitcoin is the number one cryptocurrency which was created in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin is the main currency for exchange across the entire market.

Ethereum – Among many cryptocurrencies contesting with Bitcoin, Ethereum remains the runner up. After launching in 2015, this digital currency changed crypto investing forever.

Dash – Dash came to the scene in 2014 as a secretive and anonymous digital currency. One thing outstanding about Dash is that it performs untraceable payments.

Litecoin – This payment transaction digital currency was formed in 2011 and is one of the oldest. Therefore, It is considered to be the silver digital currency to Bitcoin’s gold.

Ripple – It is one of the top three digital currencies that has a different perspective then Bitcoin. Since inception in 2012, It has begun to disrupt international transfers like SWIFT.

Cryptocurrency and Forex

Let’s take a minute to review some of the similarities between the two markets. The table below outlines interactions between cryptocurrency and Forex.

Cryptocurrency TradingForex Trading
1. Leverage
Cryptocurrency exhibit permanent and quick transactions. Although, there is a small transaction fee for every crypto transaction. Brokers and Exchanges can offer anywhere from 10x to 100x leverage on some
accounts.

With Forex trading, there is a space for leverage of 10x and much higher as well. This implies that a trader can perform a trade of $1000 using only $100
2. Impact From Announcements, Global News, And Earnings Reports:
Announcements in the crypto market to no typically correlate with the market swings. Occasionally, reports on SEC regulation, global partnerships, and listings can still sway certain assets.
Influencing factors in Forex can let traders find better opportunities. Using analytics and event procrastination, traders can also help predict the market.

3. Production
The availability of cryptocurrency is in limitation. Demand will increase due to lessening in supply over time.

The supply-demand for Forex is relatively simple and dictated by the buyers and sellers. There is more or less a finite amount of each asset class.
4. Liquidity
Traders can get large profits on the levels of liquidity across exchanges, brokers, and dealers. Additionally, crypto is slowly gaining more use-cases and reaching higher levels of adoption

Liquidity is high for Forex trading with the same market advantages but institutional focus if higher in Forex.

Beside the similar interactions, there are also similar strategies to implement on both markets.

Top 8 Strategies When Trading Cryptocurrency and Forex

1. Get rid of volatility with pound/dollar price or with a stable coin

2. Use investment theme techniques like dollar cost averaging or spreads

3. Diversification of portfolio by hedging, options and uncorrelated assets

4. Engage in smart holding like cold storage and verifiable dealers or brokers

5. Try to invest by using a stable and secure crypto asset

6. Pool Investments if able to form stronger portfolios with other traders

7. Engage in passive income while investing with cryptocurrency

8. Never trust the market sentiment or majority. If everyone expects it, it will probably be wrong

Cryptocurrency And Forex Markets

Mainly, one con and pro that exist in both platforms is the high volatility factor. The truth is that the reward will be high when the risk escalates. The market of cryptocurrency can see larger fluctuations and even larger return per risk. Although, both markets will feel the touch of price variation over time.

Forex and Crypto Similarities

In conclusion, there is a high level of involvement for people trading Forex and cryptocurrency. To trade on either market, you need perseverance, efficient equity scheduling, continuity, and effective risk management. Therefore, being open to learning from other experts will help you thrive in both markets. There is every possibility to enjoy great benefits when trading on these platforms. Dig deep into these markets today and enjoy the dividend now or later in the future.

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Brokers In the Crypto Market

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The cryptocurrency market is growing rapidly though brokers In the crypto market. Although the price of Bitcoin may not always reflect the news surrounding market growth, there are always movements being made.

Specifically, there has been a surge of brokers that offer cryptocurrency services. These services range from investing to day trading, and even to large over the counter (OTC) orders. Before we get into what is happening with Brokers in the cryptocurrency market, let’s cover what a broker actually is.

What is a Broker

A Broker is a person or institute that sells or buys securities and has licenses to do so. Investors will hire a broker as a trusted agent or middle man in commercial negotiations and transitions. Typically, brokers will buy and sell securities on the behalf of the clients with their best interest in mind. This is refereed to as a fiduciary.

Brokers will typically collect a commission, which is a usually a flat fee or percentage of each investment at the time the order is made. This commission or spread is how brokers make their money and profit regardless how how the asset, option or portfolio preforms.

Brokers invest in all sorts of financial instruments. You can hire your own investor through a firm like Fidelity to purchase stocks, bonds, mutual funds, options, derivatives, or create a portfolio all of you own.

How to Know if you Need a Broker

If you are thinking about purchasing stocks or selling stocks, it is probably a good idea to get a broker. This is due to the fact that brokers have licenses to preform trades on the securities exchange. There are two distinct types of brokers to choose from, full-service brokers, and discount brokers. The main difference between the two is the service provided. A full-service broker will review the transactions, create a financial plan, setup your portfolio and things like this. A discount broker will simply execute trades for you that you request.

The amazing thing is that for trading cryptocurrency, you do not need a broker. Anyone can trade crypto on any exchange at any time of the day including in the middle of the night. Although this is the case, unless you have experience trading and know what you are doing you may want to still consider a broker.

Why Do crypto traders use brokers

A Majority of crypto traders use crypto exchanges to preform trades on a daily basis. Crypto exchanges are very convenient, but across a spread of different assets, it can become quite difficult to always get the trade you want. Therefore, you will need to open multiple accounts and make unnecessary transfers to preform all of the trades you want.

Secondly, there are not many exchanges that allow for fiat to crypto deposits. Even more, those exchanges that do allow such deposits, do not have crypto to fiat trading pairs. To resemble these trading pairs, investors will utilize stable coins when can be limited in liquidity, not have access to all the trading pairs you desire, and sometimes be untrustworthy.

Should You Use a Broker or an Exchange?

As an investor, you need to figure out what suits your needs most. Indications that you should use a broker or dealer over an exchange are:

  • Using multiple accounts on different exchanges
  • Need for increased liquidity
  • Micro Profit focused trading
  • High trading frequency
  • Use for spreads, options, or margin accounts across multiple trading pairs

If you are a high frequency trader there are good chances you will need to increase your liquidity on multiple exchanges. When you open multiple accounts on multiple exchanges, you will incurred different fees on each. Sending assets between exchanges will also incur additional fees. When you try to margin trade on multiple exchanges, you will have different leverage limits.

Additionally, being on multiple exchanges means you will have multiple logins, passwords and potentially problems. There have been several exchange hacks, closures, and frozen assets. Finally, the more exchanges you trade on, the more risk you are also assuming for your portfolio.

Finally, traders can save time, set flat fees, reduce risk and focus more on each trade by utilizing a broker or dealer. This is incredibly important for your portfolio and success as a trader.

Trading Solutions For Crypto Traders

As an alternative to all of these issues, crypto traders are using brokers to combat all of the issues the exchanges present to traders. With the bull run in 2017, the broker market exploded and now there are over 100 crypto brokers to choose from across the market. Let’s take a peak at 10 of them.

Nadex

One of the only legally operating CFTC binary options exchanges in the US. This brokerage is retail tailored and offers options, call spreads and Touch Brackets.

eToro

eToro is a FX and CFD broker that has been providing its services mainly to traditional investors since 2006. The British FCA is based out of London and regulates this broker as well.

Olymp Trade

Certified by FinaCom, Olymp Trade is a platform that offers currency trading pairs, stocks, indicies, commodities, and cryptocurrency.

City Index

Established in the UK in 1983, this CFD brokerage is based out of the UK. Additionally, this company is regulated by the British FCA which makes it very reliable.

Eight Cap

As an Australian FX and CFD broker, Eight Cap offers trades on Forex, crypto pairs, Indices and commodities.

PrimeXBT

Bitcoin-based brokerage designed to offer leverage and cryptocurrency trading pairs. Create leverage up to 100x your original investment.

SFOX

Interactive crypto platform with a focus on liquidity over 20 exchanges, enhanced security though internal operations, and unique proprietary backed solutions.

Brokers In Crypto

Clearly, the brokers are moving into the crypto space at full speed as the market recovers and heads into the next halfening of 2020. Brokers In the crypto market are strong savvy people that can have huge influence as they open the doors to increased exposure, liquidity, and traditional investors. This movement is a clear sign that the crypto market is not going anywhere anytime soon.

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Crypto Investment Strategy

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To start this post: Crypto Investment Strategy, it is important to know that nothing in this post can or should be considered financial advice or consulting. Simply one person’s opinion on crypto investment strategy and the future of digital assets. With that being said, let’s dive into it.

Diversifying a Portfolio

A common question in the stock market and crypto market: is it important to diversify your portfolio? Of course, everyone automatically assumes the answer is yes, but are you sure? If you ever actually go back and crunch the numbers, run a comparison, and test this hypothesis you may be surprised to find that historically, it did not work in the crypto market. Let’s start with the global market and understand why traditional investor follow this strategy.

Global Market

In the global economy, markets are experiencing natural inflation as wealth grows through wealth creation across the world. Thus if there is more wealth, a stronger global economy, and increased trade. Naturally, a majority of markets will over preform on average. In a glance, the global economy has been growing steadily over the past 60 years due to an increase in energy consumption, consumers market needs, and global trade.

Clearly, not every industry will continually increase. For instance, the railroad industry was a pillar of the economy in the early 1900’s, but I would not suggest investing your life savings there now. Likewise, tech companies will rise and fall as innovation and development ensures, but how fast is global wealth growing?

Global Wealth

An article from the Financial Poise on global wealth commented:

Global Wealth is On the Rise – From mid-2017 to mid-2018, global wealth rose by $14 trillion to $317 trillion, a growth rate of 4.6%. What’s more, over that year, the growth of wealth exceeded population growth, so subsequently, global mean wealth rose to $63,100 per adult (a record high).

Financial Poise, April 2019

In short, we all statistically just become richer per person by just being alive, congrats. Additionally, the Financial Poise had this to say about the US:

U.S. Consistency – In the U.S., both total wealth ($98.154 trillion) and wealth per adult ($403,970) has grown every year since 2008. This growth occurred even when overall global wealth suffered a decline in both 2014 and 2015. In the most recent report, U.S. household wealth rose 6.5%.

It is a pretty good time to be an American as our national wealth year over year increase surpassed the global wealth increase on average.

Diversifying a Crypto Portfolio

If you are an investor and you preach diversification of portfolios with a surging market you will probably be correct most of the time. Why is this the case? Because if you diversify enough, you essentially have a spread of the average market, or otherwise known as the Market Portfolio. Investors also follow this theory due to the disposition effect, investor attention, and the Herd behavior including information cascade effect and relative wealth concerns.

Ideally, a market portfolio sounds great in theory, except when applied to the crypto market. This is because the crypto market is no where near the maturity of the global market.

Let’s evaluate this theory on crypto. For fun, let’s use memory lane and see how the top 10 assets have changed year over year in the Crypto Market using mid May as a comparison date for each evaluation.

2013 Cryptocurrency Market Top 10 Assets

There are a few things to consider when reviewing the crypto market. The first thing is that it was not a mature market in its early days. This means, there was not substantial data on the market and the assets did not have the proper time to come into fruition due to lack of exposure and education. Therefore, as we look at the top 10 assets year over year, you will start to see them change less and less as the market matures into 2019.

2013 Top 10 Assets, Photos via CoinMarketCap Historical Data

2014 Cryptocurrency Market Top 10 Assets

Even though the market is not mature in 2014, we can see Bitcoin and XRP claim the top 3 positions at an early stage. This is why these two assets could be labeled as risk-adverse assets compared to the majority of other cryptos. Remember, it is the data surrounding the price, positioning, and liquidity of these assets compared to the market portfolio which establishes their risk levels. Consistent trade volume and percentage market share (year over year) are also very important indicators of risk levels for assets and not purely fundamentals.

2014 Top 10 Assets

2015 Cryptocurrency Market Top 10 Assets

Here we see some familiar names like Litecoin, Dash, Stellar and even Dogecoin sitting all in the top 10. With the exception of Banx which ended up becoming a scam, MaidSafeCoin which is rank 78, and Nxt which is rank 144, all of prior top 10 assets are still in the top 50 of the crypto market. This is quite impressive for such an immature market.

2015 Top 10 Assets

2016 Cryptocurrency Market Top 10 Assets

In 2016, the surge of Ethereum began. A foundational game changer, Ethereum restructured the market and lead to a new breed of crypto projects. Additionally, this is the first year of top ten assets that will not be labeled scams, shutdown, or be terminated by the next year’s top 10 list. We can see the market is starting to mature in 2016 leading to a surge in prices. Additionally, the movement from traditional ICO investments into token sales would soon scale Ethereum into a new super power.

2016 Top 10 Assets

2017 Cryptocurrency Market Top 10 Assets

2017 has some familiar faces that we have all seen before. This was your top 10 assets as of May 2017 that lead the way for the bull run to $20,000 per Bitcoin.

2017 Top 10 Assets

2018 Cryptocurrency Market Top 10 Assets

In 2018, this list is the most important list to date. This is a list that is representative of the most impactful bear market that crypto industry has experienced on a large scale. We can see all of the projects listed here are still top 15 projects of the entire crypto market today without exception. This fact speaks to the maturity of the market and how far the industry has come.

2018 Top 10 Assets

2019 Cryptocurrency Market Top 10 Assets

Here we are in today’s time (2019) with a similar market ranking to the one above. By removing Tether from the top 10 (which CMC should) we would have Tron sneaking back into the top 10 and rightfully so with its vibrant (persistent) CEO and community. The only project that has been pushed slightly out of the top 10 is IOTA. Ironically, by removing Tether and the new fork of Bitcoin cash which is Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (Faketoshi), Iota would be ranked 13th which is not that far of a drop from 9th. IOTA still has mass potential and can easily climb into the top 10 given current market conditions.

2019 Top 10 Assetys

With the lack of movement coming from the top 10 market cap assets, there can be a case for a Market Portfolio that would bare more consistency with the overall market sentiment then ever before.

This problem in the prior years with diversifying your portfolio is the assets in the top 10 were never consistent enough to create a reliable spread. Now, with the market gaining substantial exposure, and the assets becoming stable, a market portfolio could be argued for.

The answer to the above question, is it important to diversity your portfolio, has changed. Historically, across the market the answer would be a resounding no. You would have lost a substantial amount of profits if you did and Bitcoins you could have obtained.

Today’s Market

In Today’s market the answer is quite the opposite. Any investors or speculator can easily make a foundational argument for a market portfolio that would potentially decrease volatility and risk. The risk is associated still with hacks, forks and exchange failures. A Market Portfolio may look something like a spread of the top 15 assets that is skewed towards the top 3 most stable assets, Bitcoin, XRP, and Ethereum. This Market Portfolio would be perfect for institutions, hedge funds, and pension plans looking to gain exposure to the crypto industry, but still maintain a minimal risk level.

Hedging your Portfolio

Another alternative to creating a standard Market portfolio and investing in it, is hedging against other types of cryptocurrency. This will be done a number of ways, but I propose it is done by crypto type.

For instance, If you invest heavily in Bitcoin, then you probably should not invest in assets like Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV or Tezos. This is because all of these assets are trying to accomplish the same task and are competitors.

Likewise, if you invest heavily in Ethereum, you probably do not want to purchase EOS, TRON, Cardano, or any other platform based currencies.

You can say the same for Ripple in comparison to Stellar and NANO.

Hedging gets trickier when you get into investing in lower market cap coins, but the same idea can be applied. If you are heavily invested in Ethereum and want to hedge from it, you will want to invest in tokens not based on the Ethereum platform. Although, this is also changing because tokens can soon migrate between chains.

Similarly, if you invest in Binance coin, you will not want to invest in Huobi or Kucoin exchange tokens.

Other ways to hedge

If you are even more risk adverse, hedge into stable coins. Do this when the market is volatile as a strategy to capture gains and decrease losses. Stable coins are mostly used by traders to reduce the exposure to the overall market volatility.

In Conclusion

To summarize, creating a market spread is becoming more and more appealing. As financial instruments open up and adoption gains traction, owning a spread of the market portfolio may be the best bet. The top 50 assets on the market will still move considerably for the coming years, so if you create a spread try to keep it close to the top 20 at a maximum.

Otherwise, do your due diligence and possibly try to hedge accordingly to not have too much exposure towards one industry. If you can not choose the assets to hedge against, or you are just not confident in your research, fall back to a spread and save yourself time and heartache.

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Should You Invest In Cardano

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To start this post: Should You Invest In Cardano (ADA), it is important to know that nothing in this post can or should be considered financial advice or consulting. Simply one person’s opinion on Cardano and the future of digital assets. With that being said, let’s dive into it.

What is Cardano

Let’s start this post off with a general overview of Cardano. Cardano is a top ten cryptocurrency that is built on a function based language, Haskell. The aim of Cardano is to provide the market with a provably verifiable smart contract based platform. ADA is promoted by 3 branches: Input Output Hong Kong, Cardano Foundation, and Emurgo.

Input Output Hong Kong: This is the branch of the trio that facilitates blockchain development, constructs research, and works with other projects for monetary gain. They are now moving to Wyoming! There has been no update on if they will change the name of the company as well. By the way please please please check out their website because wow.

Cardano Foundation: This piece of the group is the community initiative. The foundation is a group of dedicated individuals that promote the use and well being of the Cardano community.

Emurgo: Based out of Japan, Emurgo is the investment arm of the Cardano ecosystem. This group is responsible for building commercialized partnerships, bringing startups to the ecosystem, and promoting ADA smart contract development.

Market Sentiment

Now that we know what it is, what does the market think?

An important part of each project is the market sentiment surrounding the digital asset. Thus far, the sentiment on Cardano has been a highlight for this project. Not only do most investors love this project, but streamers, youtubers and bloggers do as well. There is hardly any bad news about this project besides the fact that is it taking longer than expected. When a project has a general consensus of positivity across the entire market, you know they are doing something right.

Cardano Research

Besides a positive sentiment, Cardano focuses heavily on research for their mission of a provable system. In order to create provably verifiable smart contracts with a unique consensus layer, there has to be a highly educated team of professors, researchers and innovators. Each piece and assumption has been taken into account and analyzed in the Cardano academic papers. There are over 50 research papers that have been published and a good amount of those papers have been peer reviewed on an international scale.

As impressive as this is, the real trick comes into play when the research is not only provable, but the fundamental building blocks of the ADA blockchain main-net are as well. The main-net is easily the most anticipated arrival for the Cardano community that should be coming into fruition later on in 2019.

Cardano Community

Likewise, the Cardano community is a pillar of ingenuity and zeal. There are podcasts like the Cardano Effect and Podcast Cardano. There are random AMAs lead by none other than the CEO Charles Hoskinson where he will randomly live stream on Youtube and answer questions for 2 hours. Additionally, Once a year in Florida IOHK hosts their very own summit. The summit is specifically for employees only to recap on the development and discuss the future of the company. The community wanted to attend the summit so bad that now anyone to come just to experience the company first hand.

Additionally, multiple Youtubers like Crypto Daily and The Crypto Lark are constantly shilling and promoting the Cardano name to bring more recognition and exposure to the project.

Why to Invest in Ada

At the end of things, there is still one looming question of should you invest or not. For that question, here are some reasons to invest in Cardano:

  • Charles Hoskinson was a co-founder in Ethereum one of the most successful projects on the market
  • Research driven project with scores of brilliant individuals
  • Functional based language that intuitively decreases chance of hacks, bugs or protocol failures
  • Widely adopted and liked asset with constant promotion
  • Main net release happening in 2019 that should spike enthusiasm, exposure and coin price (not guaranteed)
  • Three brand eco-system to eliminate single point of failure. Additionally, each branch is funded in unique ways which means prolonged longevity of the project

Why not to Invest in Ada

Likewise, here are some reason why you probably should not invest in Cardano:

  • Not a complete project yet
  • Launch date has been delayed already and could potentially be delayed again
  • Multiple competitors including EOS, TRON and Ethereum
  • Not the highest volume (liquidity) but regularly in the top 20

Cardano Price Projection

Besides the fundamentals, the price of Cardano is still an important aspect to consider.

Before we discuss this remember price projections are incredibly fickle and could result in a wide range of results. For more information on how I believe the market will react in the coming years, check out this blog on Crypto Market Cycles.

Assuming the crypto market will reach to an entire market cap of $1.2 – $2.5 trillion, The Ada coin price could surge to anywhere between $1.80 to $3.50 per coin. This would actually be a huge ROI for investors considering the price currently stands at $.074 per coin.

Again, price projections are considering an immeasurable amount of assumptions and conditions. Projects come and go throughout the market and Cardano could potentially phase out of popularity. Regardless, I believe this project will stay within the top 20 at minimum throughout the next bull run.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I believe Cardano is a good investment due to the fundamentals, thriving ecosystem, sustainability and general sentiment. Above all else, Charles Hoskinson has spent most of his 2018 year traveling and forming relationships with governments across the globe. I am unsure what this will mean for Cardano in the future, but it sure smells like a winner.

Finally, remember that if you can not accurately explain to you mom what you are investing in, then you probably should not invest in it. Do your research, due diligence and confirm every fact before acknowledging it as true.

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Crypto Industry

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The world is changing due to the crypto industry. Behind the curtains, every industry is comprised of silent, diligent workers that are coordinating the show. The crypto industry is no different.

Crypto Industry Impact

On the surface, it may seem like the crypto industry is a hosh-posh group of rouge cypherpunks buying and selling fake money. Most traditional investors consider the crypto market to be the wild west of money. But that is not the case, at least not entirely.

There is a truth to the idea that the crypto industry is a volatile and emotionally driven realm. Beside its apparent downfalls, the crypto market is a thriving ecosystem of talent, education and inspirational leaders. Additionally, there are thousands of jobs entering the market, constant wealth creation, and technological advancements unlike ever before.

In this post I would like to discuss why the crypto industry is good for the world, besides the currency aspect or blockchain specific use-cases.

Blockchain Jobs

First thing I want to focus on is the jobs that are being created within this industry. To give a brief idea, Linkedin has almost 4000 blockchain related jobs as of May 2019 on that platform alone.

Each project has a dedicated team of developers and community managers. This means there are thousands upon thousands of jobs created for developers because there are over 3000 cryptocurrencys alone. This does not even include the exchanges, communities and white hats. To say the crypto industry has brought tens of thousands of jobs to the global job market will soon become an understatement.

Impact of Cryptocurrency Exchanges

Let’s think about the exchanges for a second. An exchange needs a strong team of diversified developers, community managers for all their platforms, accountants, executive team, marketing managers, custodial services, possibly insurance, market data engineers, customer service representatives, office managers, and of course a dependable legal team. Taking this into consideration and the fact that there are hundreds of exchanges, that’s a lot of jobs flooding the market.

Besides exchanges, there is an entire ecosystem of financial products hitting the market. To name a few:

  • Bitcoin gateway payment providers like CryptoChill or Bitpay
  • Futures markets and margin accounts are on exchanges like Kraken and Bitfinex
  • Potential ETF proposal through the SEC and Bakkt
  • Banking products like XRP to circumvent SWIFT
  • Derivatives and options market
  • Custodial solutions and crypto processing companies

Cryptocurrency Wealth Creation

Besides the job market expanding, there is obvious signs of wealth creation. Investors pay real money to obtain these digital assets. That money does not disappear and the tokens go from being worthless to being worth “something” when they are traded on an exchange.

This is a basic example of wealth creation. Additionally, every time a miner takes his reward and puts it on the market, wealth is in essence being created in forms of these digital assets. This can lead to the global economy shifting over the next 10-15 years if the crypto market becomes a stable ranking of world power.

Blockchain Technological Advancements

Finally, the crypto industry has lead to many amazing things besides the traditional blockchain data structure. New systems like Hyper Ledger, DAG, and complete coding languages are developing due to this movement. In addition, industries like AI, Supply Chain, and IOT are thriving from an influx of projects and use-cases. As scalability becomes the norm throughout the market, we should see an increase in industry specific use-cases.

Additionally, crypto has the potential to reach the unbanked and provide liquidity for every human with a cell phone though new products being pushed in Africa. Regions in Africa are now becoming apart of the global economy that never were before. Another instance of this is from the Middle East. Some women do not own a bank accounts due to their religious laws, but now they have Bitcoin addresses to get paid for their work.

Is Crypto Good for the World?

In summary, yes. Crypto is essentially providing a capitalistic society for the entire globe to become involved in. It provides a way for every person, not only traditional or certified investors, to invest and become larger parts of the market scene. This continual influx of cash flow and liquidity from a global real time market will provide a surge in new products, discovering new solutions, and bringing the future to today.

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