Bitcoin in Brief Wednesday: Buy the Rumor, Sell the News

In today’s edition of Bitcoin in Brief, your daily roundup of crypto news, we take a look at the best performing coins of the last 24 hours. Can they sustain their momentum, or is it a classic case of “Buy on the rumor, sell on the news?”

Also read: Bitcoin in Brief Tuesday: Breakouts and Fakeouts

Verge and Ubiq Make Great Gains

A lot of crypto traders have a lot of love for ubiq, an ethereum fork that typically trades for just over a dollar. That love hasn’t converted into any sort of tangible movement for months…until yesterday, when the coin finally took off, climbing 73% in a matter of hours. The sudden pump is being attributed to an escher token airdrop to ubiq holders on April 30. It’s easy to write off airdrops, but they’re effective at pumping coins in advance and occasionally, in the case of ontology, the airdropped token itself proves to be a hit. It’s one of this year’s best performing cryptos, up another 24% on Tuesday, despite having been distributed to NEO holders for free.

Tuesday’s other great gainer was verge, which climbed another 19%. It’s now up 130% in the past month. Word of who the coin’s much vaunted partnership is with has started to leak ahead of the April 17 unveiling, but it doesn’t seem to have dampened enthusiasm for it. Of the $4.7 million raised by the community to secure the partnership, it’s been reported that 89% was contributed by Tokenpay. So much for “the verge community” making it all possible.

Bittrex Has a Rebrand

Bittrex has been teasing its newlook platform for a couple of weeks, and yesterday it came out of beta to officially launch its sleeker, shinier interface. Visually, it’s a whole lot better. The only downside is that beneath the patina of user-friendliness, it’s still the same old exchange offering the same tired tokens. While Coinbase prevaricates over which ERC20s to add and Poloniex regroups under Circle, this is Bittrex’ chance to shine. To make Bittrex great again, Richie and his team are gonna need to start listing some assets that matter.

In other exchange news, Binance has emulated Kucoin in implementing an anti-phishing code to beef up user security. “Once you have successfully set your Anti-Phishing Code, all legitimate Binance emails that you receive will contain this exact code.” In other words, you can now have the world’s largest crypto exchange email you an obscenity of your choice on a daily basis. What a time to be alive.

Monero Gets Ledger Support

Monero has been inching closer to Ledger hardware wallet support for months. There’s already code on Github that makes integration possible for those who know what they’re doing. On Monday’s Doug Polk Podcast, Monero lead developer Fluffypony confirmed that official Ledger support is imminent. He added: “I believe the Trezor guys are working on [integration too]. I’ve heard rumours of it…There is also a group within the Monero community that’s building its own hardware wallet, which I believe is based on the Trezor schematics, if memory serves.” In other news, Monero C – one of the many spin-offs to have been spawned in the past week – has been rebranded as Monero Cash and it’s got a fetching new green logo to boot.

Yearto.date Shows 2018’s Best Performing Cryptocurrencies

Yearto.date is a new cryptocurrency tracker that does what it sounds like it does. There are plenty of sites that monitor quarterly returns, but it’s handy to have one that takes it back to the start of the calendar year. It’s got some pretty charts and a useful section for masternode coins, all of which seem to be performing terribly save for Hexx.

To round off today’s Bitcoin in Brief, we’ll finish with a pithy quote from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) CEO Jeffrey Sprecher: “People put more faith in a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto that no one has ever met than they do in the U.S. Fed.” We’ll say no more.

Do you trust Satoshi Nakamoto more than the U.S. Fed? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Coincodex, and Yearto.date

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