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Old School Altcoins Can’t Stop Popping

Old school altcoins can’t stop popping

Old School Altcoins Can’t Stop Popping

Old school altcoins can’t stop popping

Viacoin. Groestlcoin. Steem. Enjin. Civic. Long forgotten altcoins and dormant shitcoins have been having a fun week. Left, right, and center altcoins have been popping off, producing 100%+ gains for those fortunate to have been holding a bag. The question on many traders minds is whether these movements are isolated events or evidence of something greater on the horizon. Could this signal the imminent return of alt season?

Also read: Ledger Reveals Physical Exploits Against Trezor Hardware Wallets

Altcoins Keep Popping Off Like Champagne Corks

Trading volume remains muted and BTC is still stagnant, but in other respects, 2019’s cryptocurrency market has escaped the barren wilderness that closed out the previous year. Across the cryptosphere, there have been green shoots of growth, and in some cases those shoots have become beanstalks and ascended to the heavens overnight. On March 11, viacoin (VIA), which has languished in the crypto doldrums for months, went stratospheric, rising by over 80% in just a couple of hours.

Old school altcoins can’t stop popping
Viacoin shot up on march 11.

A couple of days earlier, it was another altcoin with a Dutch connection, groestlcoin (GRS), that embarked on a moon mission, shooting up by over 200%. While movements of this magnitude have not been mirrored across the board, they are by no means isolated cases. In recent weeks, traders have become accustomed to awakening to news of another random altcoin doing a 2x. Notable examples include cosmo (up 471% for the year to date), enjin coin (318%), inocoin (343%), metadium (301%) and theta (219%).

Old school altcoins can’t stop popping
Enj has rocketed in value since the start of the year

Alt Season or Uncorrelated Events?

Popular wisdom holds that alt season occurs when cryptos begin recording significant gains in unison, with movements occurring wholly on speculation rather than fundamentals, prompting BTC’s dominance of the entire market to slip several percent. That hasn’t occurred yet, with bitcoin stubbornly clinging to a dominance of around 51.5% since the start of the year. Alt season is not back, therefore, despite the fact that half of the coins in the top 50 by market cap have posted double-digit gains for the year to date, the majority by 25% or greater. Just two of the gainers from this list – dash and monero (4% apiece) – are in single figures for the year, and the biggest winners from the top 50 – ENJ, THETA, BNB, and CRO – have notched up triple-digit growth.

Old school altcoins can’t stop popping
Btc’s dominance has remained stable this year

While the explosive growth of altcoins such as viacoin appears unrelated to project fundamentals, other surges are easier to attribute. Groestlcoin has just announced a fiat-crypto debit Mastercard, while Enjin has confirmed a partnership with Samsung that’s believed to be tied to the cryptocurrency wallet that will ship with the Galaxy S10. The impressive growth of Binance’s native token has also been fueled by solid development work, including the platform’s forthcoming DEX and increased merchant acceptance. The cryptosphere hasn’t entirely lost its mind then: most of the altcoins popping off can be correlated, at least loosely, to tangible events. Even with this knowledge, however, predicting the next coin to pull a 2x or 3x remains little more than a crapshoot.

Do you think alt season is likely to return soon, or will the crypto markets take longer to recover? Let us know in the comments section below.


Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Coinmarketcap and Coincodex.


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The post Old School Altcoins Can’t Stop Popping appeared first on Bitcoin News.

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Published at Tue, 12 Mar 2019 10:40:58 +0000

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Mastercard Blockchain Now Open for Payment Processing

Mastercard has opened up their own blockchain to allow payment transactions to be carried out between selected banks and merchants, but this process uses fiat currency and not bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.


Quite a few companies have taken a keen interest in what blockchain technology has to offer, and one of these corporate entities is Mastercard, the massive credit card provider. Mastercard has spent the last few years developing its own blockchain, and now the Mastercard blockchain has been opened up as an alternative method of paying for goods and services. The major difference found in the Mastercard blockchain is that it does not use its own cryptocurrency. Instead, it uses real world money.

Mastercard Blockchain Open for Business

The Mastercard blockchain is now open for specific banks and retailers to use as a payment processing system. So far, participation in this blockchain is by invitation only. The last week has been a busy one for Fortune 500 companies and blockchain technology. IMB opened up their own blockchain earlier in the week. Probably the most intriguing aspect of the Mastercard blockchain is that it does not use its own cryptocurrency, which is something that even the IBM blockchain does.

Justin Pinkham, a senior vice president at Mastercard Labs, says:

We are not using a cryptocurrency, and we are not introducing a new cryptocurrency, because that introduces other challenges—regulatory, legal challenges. If you do a payment, then what we can do is move those funds in the way that we do today in fiat currency.

Why the Mastercard Blockchain Could be Very Successful

Some people may look at the Mastercard blockchain and shrug, but there are some factors in why it could be very successful. The first such reason is that Mastercard is lord and master of a vast financial empire, so to speak. It has a settlement network that counts 22,000 banks and financial institutions from all over the world. Few other entities have such a global reach. Another important factor is that the Mastercard blockchain only uses fiat currency, which reduces costs as there’s no need to convert one form of cryptocurrency into another and then, eventually, cash.

This reduction in cost is also amplified by reducing fees for cross-border payments. Normally, a payment that crosses national borders would have to pass through different sovereign banks, racking up fees with each step. The Mastercard blockchain would remove those steps entirely, thus making the payment less expensive and probably faster. Eventually, Mastercard’s blockchain could be used for other items, such as luxury goods to provide “proof of provenance.”

Overall, this is an interesting development. Could the lack of a cryptocurrency tie-in fire a shot across the bow of other blockchains? One also wonders how the energy use for a single transaction on the Mastercard blockchain compares to current credit card transactions and bitcoin. A Dutch bank recently reported that the average energy cost for a bitcoin transaction was 200kWh, and the cost for an Ethereum transaction was 37kWh. By comparison, a credit card transaction only incurred an energy cost of 0.01kWh.

Do you think the Mastercard blockchain will have a major impact? Does the fact that it does not use a cryptocurrency have long-lasting ramifications? Let us know in the comments below.


Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Pixabay, and Flickr.

The post Mastercard Blockchain Now Open for Payment Processing appeared first on Bitcoinist.com.

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