ARK 2018 Price Prediction - Q1 - Q3 updates & more.

‘ ARK Gives no dates, we just deliver!’ - Ark's self proclaiming motto

The Ark ecosystem project and its developers have one of the most ambitious and user friendly roadmaps in the crypto market today. However time-frames / deadlines are left somewhat ambiguous, partly in an effort to avoid hype, but also to relieve pressure on the team.

Developers complete projects frequently and give updates consistently, but the roadmap technicals are set in percentages. As we've seen with the infamous mobile wallets, stuck at 98% for what seemed like an eternity, we just don’t know when releases will happen. It makes it hard as a day trader, but can also upset long term investor confidence.

So we attempt to derive predictions based on what we know.

Q1 (Jan - Mar) 2018:

Price change $7 - $25
80% confident

We will see Ark's price spring up alongside the growing market, come March updates may see the fiat price rise substantially & Btc price return to last summer levels (120k).

Jan - Feb:
Mobile Wallet release for sure. Big improvement, not even Ethereum has its own mobile wallet. You want to achieve mass adoption, you need this. *70% of all internet traffic comes through a mobile, it’ll bring Ark to many more people.

May see drastic improvement on NFC (82% complete) wouldn’t count on it, as it's been at 82% since before September. It’s closely related to mobile wallets, but Ark has much more ambitious plans for NFC than just mobile tid bits.

Feb - Mar:
Rumors of Ark CoreV2 release (Started Nov 15th 25% complete)Over a ¼ done already, rattling through it, added developers to the team too. They are set to have ICO projects running by March (Persona). I’ve heard its heads down, all focus is on the core that, will resolve many minor issues. See https://blog.ark.io/re-engineering-of-the-ark-core-9e69a2b5d70a for a detailed rundown.
Expected completion date Mid Feb – Mid Mar

The core update may be coming quickly but I think that the release of ArkVM (60% rapid progress made since announcement in late June) will arrive just as quick. We'll likely see one released after the other, within a couple of weeks. The percentages may shoot up very quickly too, pushable blockchains received an 8% bump last week, out of nowhere.
Projects / ICO’s need the ArkVM, they also need the new core, (they will have to rewrite code to use the new core so developers may think it’s better to wait) but without the VM nothing substantial can happen. Vm will use solidity, I think they’ll have no trouble attracting people and projects. Struggling to get noticed due to the hundreds of other ether tokens? Come over to Ark, all the same languages, with proof of stake and no bloat worry!

Mar - April:
Once the Core and ARKVM have been deployed it’s clear that the team will turn their attention towards the Deployment of Testnet Clones for Start-Ups (75%) & Push Button Deployable Blockchains (61%). Persona, the latest ARK ICO project, aims to have a testnet in Feb & mainnet running by early March. It’s expected that these two goals will need to be completed before this can happen, and given the close ties the team has with Persona I hope that the given dates are accurate.

Q2 (Apr - Jun ) 2018:
Price Change $25 - $60 50% confident

I can only give a general idea of what will happen during this period. If we follow the natural market cycle we will do quite well regardless, but updates should see the project take full flow. Start-ups and ICO’s will launch. Persona itself will fund 10 other start-up projects! Hopefully we will see an Ethereum bull style run, with a floor of $60.

ACES - An ongoing delegate member /u/Rayno / community project; enabling decentralised trustless coin swaps, automatic contract execution in multiple currencies, in browser metamask like wallet & much more. A marketplace will be set up so that vendors can offer their swaps.
By now it should be chugging along quite nicely, already has bridges with Eth & Btc, I know that a bridge with Raiblocks (XRB) is in the works, and a bunch of others. Persona aims to have a smartbridge to Eth by Q2.
It’ll work like this: say you only own Doge coins, you want to buy an Etheremon, you’d have to visit an exchange hope for a buyer etc etc. With Ark you just buy and execute the contract through them and you have your Etheremon. Easy peasy.

Exchanges & Fiat pairs – ARK has an ongoing goal to be listed on more and more exchanges, and a real aim to list fiat pairs. They have announced many new exchange listings, more recent exchanges offering fiat tether pairs.
Bianance USDT, maybe fiat pair. Definite pairs Blockport (Advisor to), Coss (Partnership), OKEx USDT. These are quietly confirmed, I’m sure a few more will be in the pipelines. The community is pretty active in lobbying coin exchanges, but its the team that lands the big ones.

Q3 & Q4:
Anybody's guess. I personally think that if the project takes off ICO’s & the like, we’ll see $150 - $500 range, otherwise we’ll stabilize around $40. Still a hefty return.

My research and analysis is based on the Ark roadmap, various project roadmaps, interviews, slack, discord, reddit, technical analysis.

Site: Ark.io

My favorite exchange: Bianance, decent volume, offers ETH, USDT & LTC pairs.

*https://www.ciodive.com/news/70-of-internet-traffic-comes-from-mobile-phones/510120/