After going through an extended period of relative stability, the market has shown signs of volatility and this week’s projects are all engaged in a number of developments and releases that should result in an increased amount of attention for each respective project.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency which was created in August 2017 as a hard fork of Bitcoin. BCH uses a 32MB block size which allows each block to hold more transactions, and share a history with Bitcoin as the two currencies diverged following the mining of block 478558 with all users who held Bitcoin in a compatible wallet on August 1 being credited with an equal amount of Bitcoin Cash after the fork.

Why Bitcoin Cash?

Bitcoin Cash will go through a hard fork on November 15 that will enable a series of updates to take place. A number of exchanges have declared their support for the version of Bitcoin Cash set forth by ABC, the original developers of the BCH software that first forked the Bitcoin blockchain. Both Binance and Coinbase have announced how they will be handling the upcoming hard fork. BCH has performed well as a result of the increase in attention, and this looks set to continue up to the 15th.

Maker (MKR)

MKR is the native currency of the MakerDAO project, which is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that also administers the DAI stablecoin. The DAI coin automatically reacts to price changes in order to retain a stable valuation in direct relation to the US Dollar with 1 DAI equal to $1 USD. Whilst the Dai price remains fixed, the price of MKR is free to fluctuate and an increase in the use of DAI tokens results in an increase in the value of MKR.

Why Maker?

With growing concerns over Tether (USDT), other stablecoins are increasing in popularity and investment fund a16z crypto recently purchased 6% of the total MKR token supply for $15M. Crucially, a16z crypto is a newly created crypto fund from Andreessen Horowitz and things are continuing to look up for Maker. The team recently unveiled their new CDP Portal at Devcon4 which allows people to lock up ETH in exchange for DAI in just a few clicks. As the new interface gains popularity, the usage of DAI should become more widespread.

Fortuna (FOTA)

Fortuna looks to bring the benefits of decentralization to the OTC derivatives market and solves the problem of trust with a new DPOSA consensus algorithm, structured smart contracts, a decentralized quote scheme, and digitalized supervision. The utility-based FOTA token allows the platform to access a global liquidity pool and acts as the medium of exchange accepted by Fortuna.

Why Fortuna?

The project was well regarded during its ICO and the team have finally announced that the Fortuna Platform is ready to launch on November 11. This will see the first blockchain platform for the global OTC derivatives market go live, while the Web Wallet 1.0 will also be released and the ERC20 standard compliant token replaced with the mainnet FOTA currency. These releases will lead to a natural increase in the amount of FOTA being traded over the next few weeks.

How did last week's coins perform?

Despite fluctuating in value, BTC maintained its price over the week and moved by less than 0.2% and is currently trading at $6,401. GVT suffered as a result of the overall volatility and fell by 15%, and is currently trading at $10.43. RVN was unable to maintain its recent solid performance and decreased by under 0.5% and RVN is currently trading at $0.05. The market generally moved sideways over the week, as it opened on Monday at $209B and retained the same valuation on Sunday.