This article provides a quick overview of how the crypto markets have been doing—with the focus on Litecoin (LTC), Stellar Lumen (XLM), Tezos (XTZ), Chainlink (LINK)—over the past 24-hour period.

To give you a rough idea of how things are going at press time (around 17:45 UTC on October 1), the second part of this day is not going as well as the first part, with 14 out of the top 20 cryptoassets (by market cap) currently in the red (against the dollar).

There are two things that might be responsible for some of the decline in crypto prices in the past few hours:

  • The growing realization that although Block.one seems to have got off pretty lightly in its dealings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), other crypto projects that have raised funds via ICOs may not be so lucky and could get hit with much larger civil penalties.
  • Poor U.S. manufacturing numbers: Institute for Supply Management (ISM) reported earlier today that its manufacturing index fell from 49.1% to 47.8% last month; this is the lowest level it has been since the end of the Great Recession (June 2009), and it suggests a slowdown in the U.S. economy, probably in part due to the on-going trade war with China. Naturally, this caused U.S. stock prices to go down: currently, the Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq are all down more than one percent. And as we mentioned in a crypto market update article earlier today, when U.S. stocks go down, appetite for riskier asset classes (such as crypto) tends to go down.

All market data was taken around 17:45 UTC on 1 October 2019 from CryptoCompare, which also generated the price charts shown in this article.

Litecoin (LTC)

LTC-USD 24 Hour on 1 Oct 2019.png

At the moment, Litecoin is trading at $56, up 0.38% in the past 24-hour period, but lower than the intraday high of $57.74, which was reached at 03:00 UTC.

Recent Litecoin news:

  • On September 30, the Crypto Rating Council (CRC), which is comprised of a number of leading crypto financial services firms (such as Coinbase and Kraken), released its Securities Framework Asset Ratings, which is a set of ratings for various popular cryptoassets that says whether the CRC thinks they are a security or not (the values go from 1.0 to 5.0; Bitcoin is rated 1.0, and anything that does not get rated 5.0 is considered not to be a security). Fortunately for Litecoin, the CRC gave Litecoin the same 1.0 rating that it gave Bitcoin (i.e. definitely not a security in the eyes of the SEC), saying that (1) there was no “marketed token sale and corresponding marketing efforts” and (2) Litecoin had “decentralized development and usage.” This led Litecoin creator, Charlie Lee, to send out the following tweet that day:

  • On September 26, Litecoin Foundation announced that Litecoin Summit 2019 (held October 28-29 in Las Vegas) would be featuring former U.S. congressman and U.S. presidential candidate Ron Paul:

Stellar Lumen (XLM)

XLM-USD 24 Hour on 1 Oct 2019.png

Stellar Lumen (XLM) started at $0.06165. The intraday high of $0.06219 was reached three hours later (03:00 UTC). Unfortunately, since then, the XLM price has fallen over 5%.

On September 30, Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) proposed disabling the current inflation mechanism via a change in version 12 of Stellar core, and it encouraged Stellar validators to vote to accept this proposed change.  

Tezos (XTZ)

XTZ-USD 24 Hour on 1 Oct 2019.png

Tezos (XTZ) has had a pretty good day so far. It started the day at $0.8989, and although it is currently trading lower than its intraday high, it is still in the green (unlike most of the other top 20 cryptoassets).

Both EOS, Stellar, and Tezos all received a rating of 3.75 from CRC. However, some people seem to be taking the way that the SEC treated EOS as a sign that a settlement with the SEC might also be in the cards for Tezos.

Chainlink (LINK)

LINK-USD 24 Hour on 1 Oct 2019.png

Like Stellar Lumen, Chainlink (LINK) has had a good day. It started the day at $1.761, reached the intraday high of $1.878 by 16:10 UTC, and is currently trading at $1.83 (up 5.96% in the past 24-hour period).

Out of the four cryptoassets discussed in this article, Chainlink got the second best rating from CRC: 2.0 (i.e. highly unlikely to be a security), which is the same as what Ethereum got. CRC said that this was due to three factors in its favor: (1) “sale of the token or token interests after the system had existing utility”; (2) “absence of investment-like language or marketing”; and (3) “decentralized development and usage”.

Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com