Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) CEO Lisa Su surprised in more ways than one with the release of the company’s Q1 earnings on April 25, 2018. Not only was it a feather in her cap to learn that AMD has surpassed Q1 estimates, Su also revealed that only a small percentage of income was derived from the broad cryptocurrency arena.
Su confirmed that data centers and the gaming community were seen as for the company going forward. “Gaming is a great market, there are lots and lots of gamers – from casual gamers to real enthusiast gamers – and we’re addressing that entire segment,” Su said.
She added that in the data center market, all players were looking for “more power in the cloud, so they’re really great market segments.” The company’s shares rose 11 percent immediately after the Q1 report was released, and a further one percent the following morning.
Samsung Takes Up the Slack as AMD Stays True
While Su felt that the current emergence of blockchain was more of a distraction to AMD than anything else, has reaped its due rewards for recently initiating a dedicated production of the ASIC chips used in cryptocurrency mining.
Discussing strategies for moving ahead, Su reiterated the company’s focus areas, saying that “Blockchain is a very important technology. The idea that you can do all these peer-to-peer transactions and a decentralized market, but it’s a bit of a distraction at this point. We want to focus on the core markets,” she said.
Samsung meanwhile has reported a year-on-year growth in operating income for the first quarter of 2018. The jump in revenue is at least partly attributable to strong demand for its digital coin mining chips.
“The System LSI and Foundry businesses also contributed to first quarter earnings, backed by strong demand for chips used for smartphones and cryptocurrency mining,” was shared in press . “For graphics, strong demand for consoles and VGA cards for cryptocurrency mining will continue.”
Executive VP of investor relations, Robert M. Yi, also noted that the rise in profitability of Samsung’s semiconductor business sector has played a major role in the unexpectedly high, record-setting Q1 declaration of $14 billion. For her part, Su said that the company was very happy about the progress made in the quarter and the positive start to the year. She added, “for us it’s about our long-term strategy paying off.”
Nothing but Good News for AMD
Su also answered unspoken questions around how recent predictions had ultimately panned out, after the firm had lowered price targets for AMD on March 26, 2018, mainly on the basis of the massive ASIC production capabilities of Bitmain.
The analysts had then also suggested may have buoyed AMD’s revenues., while Su responded that customers that purchased the company’s products for cryptocurrency mining made up no more than approximately ten percent of the revenue for Q1.
The crypto-mining community has up until now seriously impacted on the price of gamers’ graphics processing units, which are typically used for gaming computers but have been the default option prior to wholesale ASIC production by Samsung, Bitmain and other big players. Su expects that AMD’s products will contribute to an increase in AMD’s market share in the remaining months of 2018.
Thomson Reuters had pitched likely Q1 reports from AMD at earnings of $0.09 per share, or $1.57 billion. AMD beat that by delivering $0.11 per share earnings on a total of 1.65 billion Q1 revenue.
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The month of April saw gain around 30 percent, but some smaller altcoins outperformed the king of cryptocurrencies by a wide margin. Here, we detail the best performers of April 2018, give a bit of background to these coins and possible reasons for their performance.
GPU Coin Rebrands to Nullex (GPU/NLX)
A low-volume coin, GPU Coin surged a massive 1,115 percent over the past 30 days. Trading on Cryptopia, GPU Coin is a relatively unknown crypto with shallow volume according to . The lower the volume of a coin, the more likely it is that a few traders can corner the market and turn themselves into a price maker, which is likely what has happened over April for GPU.
Source: CoinMarketCap
GPU Coin was launched in April 2016 by a developer based in Canada. The thread for the altcoin says that GPU Coin is meant for payment to buy used GPU rigs, which are crucial for crypto mining. Despite its use case to buy mining rings, the altcoin is proof of stake, reportedly offering 15 percent per annum.
Another possible catalyst for the substantial rise in value over April seems to a rebrand, with GPU Coin now known as . From the price charts, we see that GPU Coin started its huge upward move on April 17, after hints were made on Twitter that GPU Coin would be rebranding.
We are officially announcing the rebrand of GPU Coin, NulleX: the 1st privacy coin to utilize the innovative Null Protocol. More to follow!
— NulleX (@NulleXOfficial)
AurumCoin (AU)
is another low-volume coin that displayed impressive gains over the course of April, up 848 percent over the past 30 days. As with GPU Coin/Nullex, it is traded on Cryptopia. Volume spiked on April 29 to almost a quarter of a million dollars but currently stands over the past 24 hours, slightly more significant than GPU Coin.
Source: CoinMarketCap
AurumCoin is a coin ‘backed by gold,’ as the name suggests and was introduced in 2014. The coin’s rise in price may also be down to the relatively low supply, capped at 300,000, of which around 297,000 are circulating. One gram of real gold purportedly backs the value of the coin.
The creators of the project are based in Anguilla and anonymous. uncovered an Indiegogo fundraising campaign during late 2017 carried out in AurumCoin’s name that violated the platform’s terms and conditions. Therefore, while it may be tempting to get into a cryptocurrency that has had phenomenal gains, it’s important to realize that markets are not always rational and the most legitimate projects are often those that do not look too exciting according to their price graph.
Hexx (HXX)
was another top performer, gaining over 500 percent over the past 30 days. The coin is on CoinMarketCap regarding market capitalization, with a value of $7.5 million. The 24-hour volume at the time of writing was $179,283 and mostly comes from Cryptopia.
Source: CoinMarketCap
Hexx started trading around June 2015, according to CoinMarketCap, and released a revamped whitepaper in April 2018.
Based on the zerocoin protocol, HXX have to be one of the first to issue a patch for the . Moreover, the altcoin was added to several exchanges, such as CryptoBridge, over the course of April, which could have also contributed to the bullish run.
The coin is only CPU mineable at the moment and has established a network of masternodes, known as Xnodes, in Q1 2018. A fork is scheduled for Q3 2018 that will take place using Hexx and , which will lead to BitcoinZeroX (BZX). The purpose of this fork; another privacy-focused altcoin hoping to capitalize on the ‘bitcoin brand.’
Masari (MSR)
The little-known code of fork of , Masari, also displayed strong gains over April. More awareness of the altcoin and the move to fork away from ASICs, following its parent Monero, were likely to be two contributing factors. gained just over 487 percent over the past 30 days, reaching a peak above $2.00 and currently trading near $1.15. The coin has a and is mainly traded on the TradeOgre exchange.
Source: CoinGecko
In early April, Monero conducted its which sought to kick ASICs off the network, and other CryptoNight coins followed suit. Masari’s lead developer submitted a pull request to Monero’s master branch for an improved difficulty adjustment algorithm, which brought a lot of positive attention to the coin.
Masari differs from Monero in that the ring size used to obfuscate transactions is set at a higher number; strcitly 12 versus Monero’s flexiblity of seven or above. While transactions carry a heavier load, the anonymity of transactions is improved. Some see the standalone project as a useful way to experiment with CryptoNight technology, while others dismiss it as not worthy of attention and having no future.
The plans to release a whitepaper on scaling in the near future, known as BlockTree, which ‘investigates sharding potential of the CryptoNote protocol by taking advantage of one-time public key outputs to partition/shard the transactions into a scalable blocktree.’
Never-ending Forks
Two other notable mentions are and ; due to forks scheduled for both of these cryptocurrencies, buying pressure increased toward the end of April.
ZCL is up around 300 percent over the past 30 days, while XPM has gained 320 percent.
Buying either of these coins now introduces high risk since it is likely whales will dump these coins soon to lock-in profits from the massive rise seen over the past few weeks. We saw a similar thing happen with the bitcoin Private fork, where ZCL dumped from above $200 to below $10, and also with ETC experiencing bearish momentum going into the Castillo .
Summary
A common theme between April’s best performers, is low volume and low awareness, which go hand in hand. Another thing to notice is that the biggest monthly gainers almost never trade on the bigger exchanges, but rather smaller ones. While these exchanges are generally more prone to scams/hacks, it may be worth becoming more familiar with these exchanges if you are trying to find a diamond in the dirt.
Do you think the coins mentioned will continue to grow in price? Or will they flounder during May? Let us know your views in the comment section below.
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