Altcoin News: Coinshares: Four Factors Distinguish the Current Rise of the Crypto Market from the 2017 Rally

August 8, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

Coinshares, a digital asset management company, has unveiled the first release of its semi-annual cryptocurrency market report, excerpted from the Decrypt portal.

Analysts evaluated trends from January to June 2019 and noted several significant differences between the current uptrend and the 2017 bull run.

“Four factors that were present during the 2017 bull run have been conspicuously absent during the current rally: widespread media attention; spikes in ‘bitcoin’ searches on Google; spikes in tweets about Bitcoin; and the aforementioned corresponding rally in altcoins,” writes Coinshares.

At the same time, analysts are paying attention to the long-awaited arrival of “institutional money.” In particular, they mention the investment company Fidelity, which announced its intention to launch an institutional-level custodian service for storing Bitcoin. In addition, major players such as Microsoft, Starbucks, and the Intercontinental Exchange began to show interest in the cryptocurrency industry, all of which are participating in the creation of the Bakkt platform.

Facebook deserves special attention, having announced the development of its own cryptocurrency project Libra.

“While Libra is centralised, permissioned, trust-based, not censorship resistant, not scarce, and arguably not even a cryptocurrency at all (though this term is poorly defined…) it does offer potential benefits to the world’s unbanked that currently don’t have access to services we take for granted in the West, such as online shopping,” the report said.

At the same time, the authors draw attention to certain risks of the current institutional rally. A significant role in it continues to play the unregulated stablecoin Tether. Well-known banks and pension funds, which are usually classified as institutional investors, are unlikely to use Tether to buy Bitcoin.

In their report, analysts also mentioned the second and third largest cryptocurrencies by capitalization. According to them, the “internal contradictions” continue to undermine the effectiveness of the Ethereum developer community. Coinshares, however, hopes that they will succeed in realizing the plan to launch Ethereum 2.0.

The authors call XRP “worst performer of H1 2019 by far,” whose six percent growth pales against a 188 percent recovery in Bitcoin and a 281 percent rise in Litecoin. Even the positive comments of the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde and other influential figures regarding the value of cryptocurrency as a means of payment, are not able to correct the situation.

“It is not entirely clear if these positive views apply to XRP the digital asset, or if they are simply made in reference to the company Ripple, their RippleNet product suite, or all of the above,” Coinshares writes.

Author: Marko Vidrih