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Up 33%: Bitcoin's Price Just Had Its Best Month of 2018

Up 33%: bitcoin's price just had its best month of 2018

Up 33%: Bitcoin's Price Just Had Its Best Month of 2018

bitcoin’s price rose 33 percent against the U.S. dollar in April, making it the best month of 2018 for the world’s largest cryptocurrency.

Data from CoinDesk’s bitcoin Price Index (BPI) shows that May began with bitcoin’s price at the $9,244.32 mark – a 33 percent jump from its April 1 start of $6,926.02. This marks the greatest rise in bitcoin’s price this year, and one of only two months where it rose at all within the period.

Up 33%: bitcoin's price just had its best month of 2018
Source: bpi

bitcoin’s price fell overall in January and March, and only rose 1.4 percent in February, according to BPI data.

Indeed, bitcoin fell by nearly a third in each of the negative months, dropping from $13,860 on January 1 to $10,166 on February 1, and even more drastically – from $10,309 to just below $7,000 – in March. While bitcoin has rallied this past month, it has yet to recover to the $10,000 mark, which it last fell below in mid-March.

That being said, these numbers hide the fact that bitcoin actually rose to past $17,000 in January before falling by nearly half to its February 1 level.

Similarly, bitcoin reached a low below $6,000 before recovering, as shown by the BPI. In other words, while it may have begun spending periods of time trading sideways, it remains volatile year-to-date.

Up 33%: bitcoin's price just had its best month of 2018
Source: bpi

Notably, bitcoin’s transaction volume jumped by 93 percent month-over-month, while the number of off-chain transactions through exchanges jumped by a similar 95 percent. However, fees saw a similar jump, rising 90 percent in April, according to data collected by CoinDesk.

bitcoin derivatives had a similarly positive month. Both the CBOE and CME saw their futures contracts trading volume spike this month, with CBOE in particular seeing more than 18,000 contracts traded in a single day on April 25, as previously reported.

Similarly, CME saw more than 11,000 contracts traded that day, roughly double its daily average.

Bitcoin and dollars image via Shutterstock

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Published at Tue, 01 May 2018 19:00:40 +0000

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Sandbox for Public Blockchain Projects Launched in China By Wanxiang Group

Sandbox for Public Blockchain Projects Launched in China By Wanxiang Group

On May 12, 2017, Chinese blockchain technology leader Wanxiang Group, a conglomerate with automotive, real estate and financial services holdings, announced the launch of WanCloud, a new blockchain product under its Wanxiang Blockchain Corporation subsidiary in Shanghai.

WanCloud provides an ecosystem for open-source blockchain protocols to be localized and made easily accessible to the Chinese development community and enterprise users. Initial blockchain protocols included in the ecosystem and supported by WanCloud’s infrastructure of developers and consultants are  BlockApps, Factom and Stellar.

Part of Wanxiang’s stated goal is to drive the advancement of China’s blockchain ecosystem of developers, startups and enterprises. Speaking with bitcoin Magazine, WanCloud CTO Haifeng Xi described WanCloud as “not just a technical platform; it’s an open innovation platform. WanCloud is essentially a bridge between [the] global blockchain development community and China. We aim to connect the world to the Chinese developer community, Chinese startups and traditional Chinese businesses.”

WanCloud is unique as an ecosystem in that it allows users to work with open-source blockchains more easily and in one place. Unlike traditional Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) providers that have private networks or build on top of one public chain, WanCloud plans to continually introduce the most useful open-source platforms into the WanCloud ecosystem.

Tom Tao, vice president at Wanxiang Blockchain Corporation and head of WanCloud, told bitcoin Magazine that he hoped to “bring as many fabrics as possible into the Chinese community and to drive interaction and even inter-chain collaboration, improving application level innovation for each participating protocol.”

David Johnston, chairman of Factom, and Jed McCaleb, CEO of Stellar, spoke with bitcoin Magazine about why they chose to be a part of WanCloud and how it aligns with their respective companies’ goals.

“WanCloud platform is acting as a bridge between the advanced tech provided by U.S. entities and the huge market of potential users in China,” said Johnston, “providing them a more transparent and secure use case set in important areas like data management and auditing where Factom has core competencies as a platform.”

Zeen Zhang, CEO of Factom China, added, “This partnership is important for Factom China because it will make it easier for our product to reach and serve the needs of the end users in China. WanCloud is really adding value, helping us localize the platform for enterprise users and the large community of developers in China.”

Fresh off the launch of its global payments platform Lightyear, McCaleb spoke with bitcoin Magazine about WanCloud’s benefits for Stellar’s development.

“Its an exciting development that makes it much easier for people to integrate with Stellar and will enable more experimentation … China is obviously a huge market and almost every partner that we talk to in the world asks us how they can get money either in or out of China.”

Chainbase Accelerator’s New Cohort

In addition to the launch of WanCloud, Wanxiang announced the opening of the second cohort of its Chainbase Accelerator to startups, in coordination with ICOAGE, an Initial Crypto-Token Offering platform based in Shanghai and headed by James Gong, a leading blockchain intellectual and consultant in China and CEO of ChainB. Projects accepted into Chainbase Accelerator will have the opportunity to receive technical support and consulting from WanCloud architects.

Yu Cheng, a partner at Chainbase Accelerator as well as the chief product officer at WanCloud, spoke with bitcoin Magazine about Chainbase Accelerator and said that the first cohort was “made up of experts from traditional industries and they saw blockchain [technology] as a way to solve for problems in their industries. We are looking to bring in businesses whose applications are suited for the distributed nature of blockchain tech.” Cheng has coined the term “distributed commercial value” in China to refer to new capabilities that blockchain tech enables.

WanCloud joins a burgeoning group of blockchain subsidiaries for Wanxiang Group under Wanxiang Blockchain Corporation, including consulting and research interests Wanxiang Blockchain Business Innovation Consulting and Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, as well as Chainbase Accelerator and VC arm Fenbushi Capital.

The post Sandbox for Public Blockchain Projects Launched in China By Wanxiang Group appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.