Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today were peeking at whats gone on in the world of altcoins recently, the other cryptocurrencies aside from bitcoin.

As 2016 came to a close, altcoins like ether and XRP saw their value soar. Toward the end of 2016 through early 2018, bitcoins relative share of the aggregate value of all cryptocurrencies fell to about a third.

Since then theres been a reversal. Bitcoin is not only back over the 50% market share mark, it has effectively doubled its portion of crypto worth over the last two years.

What happened? Why altcoins have struggled isnt something we can answer with a single data point or chart. But we can highlight a few reasons that help explain what happened. Well start with a look at the data and then well highlight three ideas concerning what changed that pushed altcoins down, and bitcoin back up.

Over the past few weeks weve spent most of our time digging into IPOs, larger startups, stocksand revenue thresholds. Today were expanding our horizons a bit, looking at a market that sits somewhere to the side of our usual public-private divide. Were having fun!

Lets start with a few caveats to save tweets.

We all know that comparing the value of a cryptocurrency or token isnt the only way to stack blockchains against one another. We also also know that comparing market caps isnt a perfect way to examine the market. And, yes, theres lots of development work that goes on behind the scenes that doesnt show up in the data we are going to examine.

That said, were nearly 11 years into the bitcoin era. We care a bit more today than we did a half-decade ago about what is, versus what might be.

From the fine folks over at CoinMarketCap, the following set of data maps the relative value of the major cryptos, with smaller coins aggregated into a shared line:

I know its the day after a major holiday, so lets help out. The big orange area is bitcoin. The 2017-2018 era is the period in which altcoins had their heyday. And since mid-2018 you can see bitcoin recapture most of its lost, relative prominence.

Bearing in mind that the value of bitcoin has traded as high as roughly $20,000 in late 2017, and is worth about $7,400 today, the chart doesnot merely show bitcoin recovering its former value. But it does show how over the last two years bitcoins share of the value of traded cryptos has doubled. Here are the key data points:

More simply, bitcoins share of the value of all cryptos held steady above 80% for a very long time. Then in early 2017 that same share began to fall. It continued to slip into the early days of 2018. Since then it recovered first to its December 2017 levels. And this year the relative value of bitcoin rose again, bringing it to twice its lowest ratings.

Why did that happen? Here are three reasons that form a part of the why.

For those of you with pie to eat, heres our arguments upfront. Bitcoin bounced back due to:

See more here:
As 2019 closes, a look back at what happened to the altcoin boom - TechCrunch

This post is part of CoinDesk's 2019 Year in Review, a collection of 100 op-eds, interviews and takes on the state of blockchain and the world. Chris Dannen is co-founder at Iterative Capital, a New York-based cryptocurrency investment manager, and CEO of i2 Trading, a wholesale dealer and trading desk.

Anyone whos attended cryptocurrency conferences in 2019 has experienced the narrative confusion that hit after the ICO bubble. Blockchain companies push lame enterprise products which are, at best, nice to have; token issuers shill new issuances; exchange operators search for capital.

Who isnt there? Big corporate technology customers. Like any technological device of the last 50 years, cryptocurrency needs to catch their attention before large-scale adoption is feasible.

But two years after the bubble, killer apps are nowhere to be seen. So at the start of a new year, its worth asking ourselves what sort of path might bitcoin and its competitors take to get there, and whether 2020 is an inflection point.

Whatever the path and timeline, the transition period for corporations building on bitcoin is sure to be painful; at a big company, technological change always is. Automating payroll, invoicing, expense-reporting and other financial operations on top of the bitcoin network would be a slow and expensive process, requiring a massive amount of time and money spent on building software and retraining workers.

Only an extremely serious problem could be the impetus for such a scenario. Does such a problem exist today, and if so, how might cryptocurrency solve it?

The speed of corporate implosion

Consider a few data points:

From Nokia to Microsoft to Borders to BlackBerry, incumbents fail again and again to preserve their market position and grow wages, despite all the market data they vacuum up each year, all the consultants they pay and all the bright young college grads they hire.

This is a big problem. Why is it so?

The problem is that digital technology has advanced the practical arts (from spreadsheets to movie-making) to such a degree that advanced planning and hyper-efficient processes once strengths of the large hierarchical organization are no longer as valuable. In an unpredictable, ad-hoc business environment, agility rules and bureaucracy is a drag.

If Bitcoin and similar networks cant help large companies become more agile, they may have little relevance in the economy of the next 20 years. What is the path to utility?

The philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel theorized that we can reason about the future by conceiving of futuribles. A future state of affairs enters into the class of futuribles only if its mode of production from the present state of affairs is plausible and imaginable, he wrote. A futurible is a descendant of the present, a descendant to which we attach a genealogy that extends from conditions today.

What are the conditions of the whirlwind corporate world of the last decade? In their attempts to move faster and forestall their early demise, the largest incumbents have begun to reorganize to reduce hierarchy and push more decision-making to the margins of the business and away from upper management. What is the corresponding futurible as we look to the 2020s?

What sort of operating model might corporations be forced to adopt next, as the physical world digitizes and the speed of business further increases?

The dual-OS company

While hes never written about cryptocurrency, Harvard Business School professor John P. Kotter originated the concept of the dual-operating-system company, which combines a traditional hierarchical management organization with a network of supertemps, some paid and some unpaid, outside the office walls.

Hierarchies, he says, are good for planning, creating budgets, defining roles, HR functions and measuring results. What they do not do well, he wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2012, is identify the most important hazards and opportunities early enough, formulate creative strategic initiatives nimbly enough, and implement them fast enough.

He advocates what he calls a second operating system, a network of people who design and implement strategy from outside. The network half of the dual-OS company is like an immune system for the traditional corporate hierarchy, constantly surveying the business, its markets and its competitors to bring new information and practices in.

Kotter says about 10 percent of the network should be comprised of full-time employees, and the rest carefully-selected part-timers and volunteers, who are given highly structured processes to make sure their contributions are meaningful, and whose work is seen at high levels of the hierarchy.

There are a few practical problems with an ideal implementation of Kotters dual-OS model, however, especially with a very large network. One is payroll. If roles are non-standard, with varying schedules of compensation for part-time, full-time and contract work (and payees constantly dropping on and off at high volume), an army of HR staff would be needed to handle the load. Its even worse if paychecks are being remitted around the world to a network of external contributors, in places where the business doesnt have a local office.

Could it be that dual-OS is the panacea to ailing corporations and that it needs a new sort of financial infrastructure to be implemented economically?

Where bitcoin comes in

Bitcoin is, at heart, infrastructure built for (and by) leaderless groups, operating by emergent consensus. Examples of leaderless groups include not just FOSS developers, but also hashtag-based movements like #metoo, or Occupy Wall Street-style protests like the Arab Spring in 2011. In Kotters dual-OS company, the network half is one such leaderless group.

Bitcoin is ideal infrastructure for leaderless groups, because wallets can be issued without permission, and Bitcoin payments are easy to automate, giving companies the flexibility to pay people in very small or very large amounts, at large scale, anywhere in the world.

Another headache of dual-OS is budgetary permissions. Companies like to set thresholds where staff can spend money with or without permission, but these rules are often not very granular at the corporate credit card level, and enforcing them otherwise can be hard. Custom wallet software, perhaps with multi-signature functionality for large wallets, can help companies put the spending power in the hands of employees, reducing the bottleneck of managerial approval by formalizing the spending rules into the wallet software iself.

Remittance is another issue, for corporations and their employees overseas. Remote offices often need to remit payment back home, but forex conversions can be difficult, slow and expensive in some geographies. Employees working in far-flung places need to be paid locally, but also like to send money home; fees and delays abound with existing financial systems. The increasingly global nature of business means that suppliers, manufacturers and logistics agencies may need to be paid in dozens of different currencies.

Thus, the dual-OS operating model seems like a valid futurible for todays corporations, and its challenges create a need for digitized financial infrastructure.

To the business world, bitcoin and its competitors are effectively competing to be the premier inter-settlement-network network. That is, networks which transmit value between poorly connected fiat systems, filling gaps where other services are too expensive, bureaucratic or slow.

Before long, local money transmitters will be able to push large amounts of value cheaply and instantly through Lightning (or similar) channels from one country to another, meaning that their customers never even need to own bitcoin to benefit from the technology to remit value overseas.

This has been a cursory look at how bitcoin might find its way into the mission-critical enterprise stack. In an attempt to remain agile, large incumbents have already begun to wrap themselves in permeable networks, even without knowing how such a dual-OS structure might scale. As they grow their networks, its only a matter of time before the cryptocurrency narrative regains its strength.

*Data from Aaron Dignans new book, Brave New Work.

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.

Here is the original post:
Corporations Need Bitcoin. They Just Don't Know It Yet - Coindesk

Since the start of 2019, the crypto market has been on the receiving end of an insane amount of financial volatility.

For example, in January, the total market capitalization of this burgeoning sector was around $130 billion. However, by July, the market at large had witnessed an influx of bullish momentum that pushed the total capitalization value of this space to a whopping $373 billion. Following this period, the aforementioned bull run proceeded to subside quite a bit, with the market now hovering a tad under the $200 billion threshold.

A few cryptocurrencies maintained a strong financial standing all year long and were able to stave off the various economic slumps that were observed throughout 2019. Here are the standout cryptos not named Bitcoin.

While a fair few people may be surprised to see ChainLink (LINK) in the list of the best-performing cryptocurrencies of 2019. The platform essentially seeks to bridge the gap that exists between blockchain-based smart contracts and real-world applications.

From an economic standpoint, LINK started the year relatively slow with the price of a single token rising from $0.31 to just over $0.45 over a five-month period. However, by the first week of July, the currency reached its financial apex, with a single LINK token being traded for as high as $3.74. And while the currency has lost a bit of its insane financial momentum over the last couple of months, LINK is still trading slightly above the $1.90 mark.

All in all, the LINK/USD trading pair has surged by over 500% since the start of the year, and the LINK/BTC pair has also gained more than 300% over the same time period which is quite an impressive feat, to say the least.

Released onto the market back in mid-2017, Binance Coin (BNB) is a token that can be used for trading purposes as well as for the facilitation of various fee-related payments within the Binance exchange platform. Not only that, but Binance also provides BNB holders with various incentives and discounts for making use of the digital currency for internal transactions.

In regard to BNBs performance, the currency started the year at a price point of around $6. However, by the final week of May, the price of a single BNB token rose to $35.20 thereby signaling a growth of more than 450%. During the third quarter of 2019, BNBs value slid from $33.10 to $15.79, thus showcasing a drastic reversal in the currencys fortunes. However, over the last couple of months, BNBs value has remained relatively stable, with the assets average value in December currently floating just below the $14 mark.

Since the start of the year, the overall value of the BNB/USD pair has increased by over 140%.

Tezos (XTZ) is a decentralized computing platform that makes use of a formal verification protocol as well as a proof-of-stake consensus module for its internal governance-related matters. In regard to how the system works, XTZ holders who stake their tokens are eligible to receive additional tokens as an incentive for creating and verifying blocks.

From a financial performance standpoint, XTZ started off the year at a price point of $0.47. However, by the end of the first quarter of 2019, the value of a single token had scaled up to an impressive $1.06. XTZs performance continued to surge between April and June, with the currency touching its annual high of $1.88 on May 19. During this years third quarter, XTZs value continued to hover around the $1$1.20 region. However, since the start of December, the crypto asset has once again picked up momentum, with a single token currently trading for $1.51.

Over the course of 2019, the value of the XTZ/USD trading pair has increased by over 190%.

The Synthetix Network Token (SNX) is an ERC-20 token that is meant to facilitate all of the native transactions associated with the Synthetix exchange. Additionally, SNX tokens are traded using a peer-to-contract model and are also used as collateral to back SNX synthetic assets, called Synths, that are employed within the Synthetix Network to track the market value of any basic asset.

Between January and April, the price of a single SNX token touched a maximum of $0.07. However, since May, the digital currency has continued to soar in value with the only major slip coming on Nov. 26, a time when the crypto market at large experienced a major financial pullback.

Overall, since the start of 2019, SNXs value has increased by over 200%, with the currency currently trading for $1.33.

Currently one of the markets top 10 cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is basically a hard fork of Bitcoin.

From a financial perspective, one BCH was trading for $135 during the second week of January. However, by the beginning of April, the currency had soared to over the $300 threshold. The currency reached its annual monetary apex on June 26, when the asset was trading for $479.96. During the third quarter of 2019, BCHs value remained relatively stable hovering around the $300 mark but since the start of November, the currency has been continually slipping in value, with a single coin currently trading just over $195.

All in all, over the course of the last 12 months, the value of the BCH/USD trading pair has risen by over 30%.

Cosmos (ATOM) is a decentralized network comprising of various blockchains that are independent, scalable and interoperable. The platform has gained a lot of attention over the course of 2019, especially since cryptocurrency associated with the network, ATOM, surged dramatically during the month of May. To put things into perspective, it bears mentioning that on Jan. 1, ATOM was trading for a price of $0.001.

As things stand, the currency is selling well over $4.20.

Litecoin (LTC) is a top 10 cryptocurrency that was created by Charlie Lee to serve as a more resource-friendly version of Bitcoin.

LTC was trading for $32 during the first week of January. But by June 22, the altcoin had risen to an impressive price point of $141.73. Since then, LTCs performance has continued to decline, with the currency trading for an average price of around $43 throughout December.

All in all, the value of the LTC/USD trading pair has increased by around 40% since the start of the year.

Basic Attention Token (BAT) is a digital currency used in the Brave internet browser. Brave is a blockchain-based internet browser that incentivizes its users internet habits by rewarding them with BAT tokens for watching ads, spending a certain amount of time on a particular website, etc. From a technical standpoint, the browsers native framework is quite similar to that of Chromium a project that was created by Brendan Eich, the man behind JavaScript and the co-founder of the Mozilla project.

BAT started off the year trading at around $0.13. However, by the second half of April, the currency had already scaled up to its annual high of $0.44. Following this period, the top 50 asset continued to slide in value until September, after which it once again began a financial ascent, reaching a relative high of $0.27 on Nov 17. Since the start of December, BATs value has remained relatively stable around the $1.70 region.

Over the course of 2019, BATs value has increased by around 35%.

Ether (ETH) is a top 10 crypto asset that is widely recognized as being the second most popular digital asset (i.e., after Bitcoin) on the market today. Ethereum developers envisioned the platform as a world computer for smart contracts a digital protocol that helps facilitate, verify and enforce a contract whose terms have been predetermined. Not only that, but the Ethereum ecosystem also allows for the issuance of ERC-20 tokens.

On Jan. 13, Ether was trading for $116. However, over the course of the following six months, the value of the second-biggest cryptocurrency continued to increase, finally scaling up to its annual high of $334.66 on June 26. Following this period of bullish momentum, Ether once again continued to slide before finally settling down around a price range of $150$180, except for a brief period in September when the currency surged above the $210 mark.

Since late November, Ether has been trading steadily between $130 and $150, thereby showcasing an overall value increase of around 20% since the start of the year.

EOS is a cryptocurrency platform that can be used by developers to devise a number of novel decentralized applications. In this regard, the EOS token is used to facilitate the eponymous systems native transactions as well as its internal processes. Additionally, the EOS blockchain has been designed to be highly scalable and leaves a lot of room for customization which is one of the main reasons why the project is so popular in the first place.

In terms of EOSs financial performance, the digital currency was trading for $2.23 during the second week of January. Between the months of February and May, the asset surged quite dramatically, with the value of a single token reaching a price point of $8.54 on May 31. Over roughly the next five months, the currencys value continued to float between $3$3.80. However, since the last week of November, EOS has remained quite stable, currently trading around the $2.55 mark.

Presently, the EOS/USD trading pair has gained around a 10% value since the start of the year.

More:
10 Best Performing Cryptos of 2019 Not Named Bitcoin - Cointelegraph

Bitcoin (BTC) has been caught in a firm uptrend over the past several days, which has primarily been the result of the massive upwards momentum that was sparked when it tapped lows of $6,400 earlier last week.

This momentum led BTC as high as $7,700 today before it was met with significant resistance that led its price reeling back down to the lower $7,000 region, although analysts expect this movement to be fleeting and followed by an extension of this newfound upwards momentum.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading up over 2% at its current price of $7,350, which marks a slight drop from its daily highs of $7,700 that were set earlier this week.

The swift rejection incurred by the cryptocurrency this morning sent it as low as $7,250, but bulls have been able to support the crypto above this level.

Although the rejection at this level does seem to spell some trouble for the cryptocurrency, it is important to note that analysts widely believe that it will be followed by an extension of its upwards momentum, as this latest drop could simply be driven by BTC filling an open CME gap around its current price levels.

HornHairs, a popular cryptocurrency analyst on Twitter, explained in a recent tweet that he is entering a long around BTCs current prices, anticipating another rise up to its range highs of roughly $7,700.

$BTC long scalp. Punted a long on the sweep below local lows Already took half off around here due to the CME gap being below price, making this a free ride. Bear trap or gap fill? Lets see he explained while pointing to the chart below.

How bulls respond to this rejection in the coming hours will offer significant insight into where Bitcoin will lead the aggregated crypto markets next.

See the original post:
$7,700 to $7,300: Where Bitcoin Is Heading After Violent Rejection - newsBTC

Bitcoin (BTC) recovery has gained traction on Sunday. The first digital coin is changing hands at $7,435 at the time of writing; however, the upside momentum remains strong, which means Asian traders may wake up on Monday to see bitcoin and a new December high. BTC/USD has grown by 3.5% on a day-to-day basis and 4% since the beginning of the day.

All major altcoins are demonstrating similar momentum. ETH/USD has settled above $132.00, XRP/USD is exploring territory above $0.1900.

From the long-term post of view, BTC/USD used 61.8% Fibo retracement as a jumping-off ground and moved above the middle line of the daily Bollinger Band at $7,230. As the momentum gained traction, the price cleared both $7,300 and $7,400 barriers with the next hurdle located at $7,650 ( the upper line of the daily Bollinger Band) and $7,800 ( SMA50 (Simple Moving Average) daily). A sustainable move above this barrier will bring $8,000 into focus.

Meanwhile, according to a famous cryptocurrency technical analyst Joe Roger, this is a basic level for reversal.

See the original post here:
Bitcoin's rally gets traction, $8,000 within reach? - FXStreet