2018 So Far





What a roller coaster 2018 has been so far. Early on we hit an all-time high market cap of more than $830B and have seen it plummet as low as $331B. Amidst a storm of negative news, Bitcoin bottomed out at a price just under $6k and before seemingly rally as it approached $12k only to tumble back down below $9k.

There's a lot of uncertainty in the market right now and that's one of the reasons I decided to post a quick update. However, there's also been a number of major developments for some of the coins I have already reviewed that warrant an update as well, and as much as I'd love to comprehensively rewrite each article I've decided that the time investment is too much and there's some merit to leaving the reviews in their original state. Lastly, as some of you have mentioned the last review I posted was around 6 weeks ago on January 31st. Therefore this update is going to cover the overall market (mainly in the context of Bitcoin), an update on some coins I've already reviewed and an update around Crypto Advocate. Let's get the site update out of the way first and move onto the more interesting topics.

Crypto Advocate: An Update

When I first launched Crypto Advocate I was posting new reviews on a weekly basis and that clearly hasn't been the case as of late. There's a few reasons for this.

Firstly, writing coin reviews takes a lot of time. A typical article will take 6-12 hours to research and write depending on how familiar I am with it and how complicated the model is. When I first launched the site I prioritized getting things off the ground above most other things and it quickly became apparent weekly reviews weren't feasible given the demands of my career and personal life. At this time I can't commit to any schedule but I can assure you there will be more reviews coming.

Secondly, it's been a particularly busy time in my personal life. I'll spare you the details but I don't expect this to change in the near future.

Lastly, as I said it's been a crazy market the past few months. As a result of this I've focused my time on looking at the market as a whole and the alt coins already in my portfolio rather than on discovering and researching new ones. While I've been keeping an eye on a few cryptos not currently in my portfolio (and several that are already in my portfolio that I haven't reviewed here) I've really narrowed my focus to my largest holdings.

Thanks to everyone who has reached out to me via email or Twitter and continue to follow the site. While the site may not have much in the way of new content you can find some of my thoughts on the market occasionally on Twitter (@crypto_advocate).

Alt Coin Updates

A few coins I've reviewed have had significant news come out so in addition to giving an update on those, I thought it would be worth providing a brief update on all the coins I've reviewed so far. I'll also comment on how they've performed as an investment in relation to bitcoin or ethereum as opposed to fiat.

ARK: When I reviewed ARK back in November it was an ambitious project aiming to achieve a wide range of objectives. In a lot of ways, this is still true but they've shifted their priority towards the "push button" blockchain platform which cements it in the enterprise platform category. A conceptual focus was much needed in my opinion and I give credit to the team for proceeding to do that and focusing on one of their strongest features. The main concern here is this is already a crowded space but in case you haven't read the review yet (you should) ARK has a lot of advantages in their platform. They've also made great progress on ARK Core v2 and hired a marketing director, which again was much needed and I hope this leads to greater awareness and recognition in 2018. In terms of value, ARK was just under 30k satoshi's at the time of my review and has gone as high as 70k satoshi's since. Lately it has been hovering around 34-36k as of late so still well in the profit despite the market turn down. The staking rewards don't hurt either and makes ARK one of the most comfortable holds during this bear market. ARK can be bought at Binance.com

Nav Coin (NAV): NAV Coin has been busy the past few months and has weathered the down turn better than most coins. They've launched Nav Pay and completely revamped their road map with one of the main features being Valence (definitely give the linked post and their Valence series a read). Many of the key road map features I originally wrote about are still there but they've redefined the overall vision and will even launch masternodes at some point. The NAV team have also added several marketing team members and developers. I'm really optimistic on what they are going to do this year. NAV was trading around 10k satoshi's at the time of my review and has gone as high as 30k satoshi's. Even in the current market it has generally held around 15k satoshi's, up 50% from the time of review. It's also proof-of-stake so the 5% staking rewards are a bonus. NAV can be bought at Binance.com

Secured Automated Lending (SALT): The platform successfully launched and has funded a number of loans with enough demand that they've had to temporarily stop taking applications. However, the volatility of the market has forced a number of liquidations and the platform clearly hasn't achieved enough adoption for the arbitrage to bring up the valuation as SALT tokens have been hit hard in this market. At the time the platform launched there was an opportunity to flip (one of the approaches I outlined) for around twice the SALT/BTC rate as of time of posting. As for holding, it's been a bit grim and flipping definitely proved to be the better option. However, the value really can't drop a whole lot more and the platform is working so eventually that price should come up but it may not be any time soon. If you decide to pick up some SALT it can be bought at Binance.com

Particl (PART): The marketplace Alpha is expected to launch this month though a date has yet to be set. Could be a a pump in the near future with the launch though nothing is guaranteed in this market. Price has remained quite strong in this market bouncing between 200k-300k satoshi's which is 2-3x the 100k satoshi mark at the time of my review.

Power Ledger (POWR): Power Ledger has expanded operations but generally there hasn't been any massive news and I don't expect there will be until closer to asset germination in Q3. When I first posted the review POWR was around 7k satoshi's, down from 11k which I called out as overvalued at the time. It saw another spike back to all time high's above 11k in January before slowly dropping to it's current value of 5k. Personally, I'm building on my position right now as I believe this is finally reasonable value for the project. If you want to buy some, POWR can be bought at Binance.com

Stellar Lumens (XLM): Stellar had a huge finish to 2018, announcing a host of partnerships, including SatoshiPay, and new ICO's on the Stellar platform. It's been fairly quiet as of late though there are rumours of major announcements to come. In terms of price, XLM was sitting around 900 satoshi's at the time and skyrocketed in the coming weeks to a massive 5.6k, about 6x. Hopefully the review encouraged a few people to get in before that as it had one of the biggest increases of any alt coin in that time period. It's part of my long term portfolio and has held above 3k satoshi's, still over 3x the price at the time of review. You can buy XLM at Binance.com

Basic Attention Token (BAT): BAT has struck up partnerships with a number of organizations and individuals, most notably Twitch. They've also launched several rounds of community grants and the Brave browser continues to grow in adoption. In terms of price, it was a great time to buy after my review was posted as price was way down at 1.3k satoshi's and has gone as high as 6k since. BAT is currently sitting around 2.8k, more than 2x from the time of my review. You can buy BAT at Binance.com

Blockport (BPT): Blockport crowd sale sold out quickly and the team has been hard at work getting listed on Kucoin and working on the beta which should launch late this month. BPT has done very well since the ICO so I hope many of you got a chance to get in on it. It's currently sitting at 2.1x ICO price and has gone as high as 2.6x. You can buy BPT at Kucoin.com

Dragonchain (DRGN): Dragonchain hasn't had any major developments, though it's almost my most recent review so that's not surprising. They've had a few more sign-ups to the incubator and the AWS serverless platform should hopefully be launching this month. At the time of my review, DRGN was sitting around 23k satoshi's and has not fared well, dropping 50% since. This isn't surprising as once again, this was the only review other than BPT posted during Bitcoin's decline. Still optimistic on DRGN going forward in 2018 but it's probably not one I'd hang onto in an extended bear market. You can buy DRGN at Kucoin.com

Overall, almost all the coins I reviewed since the site launch have done quite well. SALT may not have done fantastic but worked great as a flip and still has long term potential while everything else other than DRGN is well up. I'm pretty comfortable holding most of these coins at this point in time. Remember, nothing I post is financial advice and no review is a recommendation to buy without first doing your own research.

Cryptocurrency Market Overview (and Bitcoin Technical Analysis)

The overall market has seen a massive drop in value, as I outlined above, but I do believe it is temporary in a lot of ways. However, I have to preface that with a few points:

We've just come off a bull run of epic proportions where almost every project out there gained value, regardless of merit.

There are a lot of projects out there with incredibly high valuations despite limited use cases, no working product or limited adoption.

Blockchain technology has tremendous potential and the technology itself is starting to be recognized, though it's still early. Despite this, there is no guarantee that ledger technology continues to exist as the decentralized ecosystem it currently is. Regulation is going to play a bigger role and so will private companies and individuals.

In my opinion, even though I think we'll see a new all-time high market cap in the future, it's not going to happen as rapidly as what we recently witnessed. It's not going to be as widespread either, where everything related to blockchain soars. I expect projects with real use cases that can scale and appeal to major audiences, and that are backed by strong teams, to increase in value over time (not overnight). Meanwhile projects that don't really add value via the blockchain and can't deliver on working products are going to start to fade away. ICO's are going to change as well as regulation increases. In a few words, the cryptocurrency market is going to evolve.

Now in terms of where the market is headed in valuation, no one knows for sure. As I stated above, I believe long term we're setting new highs but there could be more downside in the future before we get there. I'm going to share my Bitcoin observations and chart with all of you, and although it doesn't represent the entire market we all know the key role it plays.





There's a lot going on in this chart as it's the chart I look at every day when I try to get a sense of where this market could go. Examine it as you wish but it's more so meant to be a visual guide for some of the following observations. Before you read those, keep in mind this is not financial advice, I'm not a professional and generally I'm not even much of a trader. These are my own thoughts about where the market could go in the short and long term.

Up until the end of November, Bitcoin was trading within the range of a long term channel (lower blue channel in chart) and had been for a long time. Then it broke through and maintained above the channel for the first time, creating an entirely new channel and beginning what was considered a parabolic run up. As I mentioned, this was a bull run of epic proportions but it wasn't to last. Bitcoin peaked around $20k in mid-December and has been in a general downtrend ever since (thick red line). After temporarily finding support at $14k, $12.8k and $11k, Bitcoin dropped out of the parabolic channel and back into the long term channel. It then tested the bottom of that channel and even dropped through briefly, though did not close below. This is what has been the recent Bitcoin bottom of $6k and so far it has held as the low point.

Bitcoin started to recover from that point and it looked like we were off to a nice bounceback until it hit a resistance zone starting just under $11.8k (lower red box) where it met up with the 50 day moving average and was rejected. Bitcoin began another rally, breaking the 50 day but ultimately getting rejected by the same resistance zone and the downtrend line. Since then, things have gotten interesting again. Bitcoin officially formed a double top and on the way down almost tested the bottom of the channel before finding support in the upper green box where we currently sit. Bitcoin has now formed a smaller channel within the channel but has been unable to break out of this zone definitively, and when it has managed to break out it's been rejected by the 50 day.

So what will Bitcoin do? From a short term bullish perspective, ideally Bitcoin maintains that channel or break out through the top, regain the 50 day moving average and finally breaks the downtrend line. However, even if that happens it still has to break the $11.8k resistance zone otherwise it will end up as a triple top. From the short term bearish point of view, Bitcoin faces potential rejection by the 50 day and the downtrend line and either of those could lead to a retest of the bottom of the long term channel.

As long as Bitcoin stays within it's current channel, the outlook is neutral to slightly bullish but if Bitcoin falls through the long term channel and closes there, or does not bounce strongly from around the $7.5k support zone (middle green box) that opens the potential for a longer term bear market and a potential new low as far down as the $3k support zone (not pictured). That doesn't mean Bitcoin will drop that far, but the scenario must be considered. In order for Bitcoin to really turn bullish it has to break the $11.8k-$12.8k resistance zone in my opinion and therefore that's really the first entry that I would consider safe. For an early, riskier long term entry I'm looking at a confirmed close after a test of the bottom of the channel; right now that's likely in the $8-8.5k range. Otherwise, I'll consider an entry upon the break of the long term downtrend. Of course with technical analysis, the outlook can change in a moment based on price action so take this analysis with a grain of salt and as of this current moment in time. Long term, any price should be a bargain but we have to keep a careful eye on that channel support otherwise there's the risk of significant downside.

So that's Bitcoin, but at this point in time the market follows Bitcoin. Keep an eye on what it does and that will indicate where the market will go.

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#ARK #NAV #SALT #PART #POWR #XLM #BAT #BPT #DRGN #BTC