This article provides a quick overview of how the crypto markets have been doing—with the focus on Bitcoin (BTC), XRP, EOS, Binance Coin (BNB), and Chainlink (LINK)—over the past 24-hour period.
To give you a rough idea of how well the crypto markets are doing today, 48 out of the top 50 cryptoassets (by market cap) are currently in the green (against the dollar).
All market data used in this article was taken around 06:10 UTC on 8 October 2019 from CryptoCompare, which also generated the price charts shown in this article.
Bitcoin (BTC)
This past Sunday (October 6) was not a good day for Bitcoin, because during the day, it fell from $8,174 to $7,868. Yesterday (October 7), however, Bitcoin staged a comeback, starting the day at $7,838 and finishing it at around $8,215. As you can see in the above 24-hour price chart, Bitcoin is currently trading at $8,274, up 5.19% in the past 24-hour period.
Macro factors that may have helped Bitcoin include
- hundreds of thousands of businesses and individuals in Turkey receiving foreclosure notices on October 7 telling them that their bank accounts have been frozen because they have not fulfilled their tax obligations;
- ATMs in Hong Kong allegedly running out of cash or lowering maximum withdrawal limits over the past weekend as a result of some residents being concerned about losing access to their bank accounts; and
- the fraud scandal in India involving Punjab Mumbai Cooperative (PMC) Bank and the resulting six-month restriction (Rs 1,000 per customer) on withdrawals imposed on PMC Bank by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
XRP
XRP has been enjoying a nice little run in the past few days. On October 2, it was trading as low as $0.2457, and now it is trading at $0.2811, which means a gain of 14.4% in less than one week.
So, what is driving the XRP price higher? Here are a few possibilities:
- Ripple seemingly being on an acquisition spree, with the latest purchase (announced on September 30) being Icelandic crypto trading firm Algrim.
- Ripple announcing on October 2 that, just like RippleNet is “a growing global network for financial institutions, Xpring is going to become “a global network for developers”, i.e. “the open developer platform for money”.
- On October 3 and 4, Ripple’s UBRI Connect, “the first-ever annual convening of the University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI)”, hosting faculty and students from 40 universities (based in over a dozen countries) to the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. On day one of this conference, Ripple’s SVP of Xpring, Ethan Beard, explains how the Xpring platform would make it easy to integrate money into apps.
- Yoshitaka Kitao, President and CEO of Japan’s SBI Holdings, tweeted on October 7 that XRP remittances to Mexico and the Philippines—via Ripple’s xRapid—had gone up 80% in September.
EOS
EOS has gone from a low of $2.876 on October 3 (19:00 UTC) to $3.211 today for a gain of 11.65%. As you can see in the price chart shown above, most of that gain has come in the past 24-hour period.
One reason for the current excitement around EOS is the release of the source code for EOSIO 2.0 Release Candidate 1, which was announced yesterday by Daniel Larimer, the CTO of Block.one:
#eosio 2 rc1 is officially available for community to download and utilize on testnets and even non critical eos nodes. Assuming no major issues this will be the final 2.0 version and it’s super fast!
— Daniel Larimer (@bytemaster7) October 7, 2019
A blog post by Block.one published earlier today explains that the main aim of EOSIO 2.0 is to “make it faster, simpler, and more secure to build on EOSIO.” And since Block.one believes that the main bottleneck for blockchain development is the speed of execution of smart contracts, they have built their own WebAssembly (WASM) engine; apparently, this runs EOS Mechanics WASM CPU benchmarks “up to 16x faster than Binaryen, which was released with EOSIO 1.0.”
Binance Coin (BNB)
A little earlier today (at 06:00 UTC), the BNB price managed to climb above $16.00 for the first time since October 1.
And yesterday, Binance, in its weekly report, mentioned various achievements from last week, some of which are listed below:
- Important updates to both the iOS and Android versions of the Binance app.
- Partnership with Coinfirm.
- Binance Futures continuing its rapid growth (current the crypto futures exchange with the fourth highest trading volume); its 24-hour BTC trading volume is now greater than the BTC trading volume on Binance’s spot trading platform.
- Trust Wallet, Binance’s official non-custodial wallet, now supports staking.
Crypto investor Gautam Chhugani sang the praises of BNB in a tweet posted earlier today:
$BNB’s fundamental quality is that as demand grows with greater adoption & utility, supply declines with burn.
As platform services grow (e.g futures, lending, IEO), both demand & burn momentum increases.
This dynamic makes it an ideal HODL token. Let’s not forget the basics.
— Gautam Chhugani (@gautamchhugani) October 8, 2019
Chainlink (LINK)
LINK, one of best performing cryptoassets of 2019, continues to impress traders and investors. Over the past 30 days, the LINK price has gone from $1.79 to $2.355, i.e. a gain of 31.56%.
LINK HOLDers are not surprised by the continuous stream of good news (in the form of new partnerships) from Chainlink, but yesterday’s announcement was pretty special. In an announcement titled “Introducing the Trusted Computation Framework”, Eugene Yarmosh, Intel Systems Architect (and TCF Technical Lead )and the Chainlink team explained how “blockchains can greatly enhance their capacity to meet enterprise requirements around privacy and scalability by using Chainlink oracles to route transactional computation off-chain to the Trusted Computation Framework (TCF).”
Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com
