The Curious Case of PIVX

Update: This article was initially published on www.thehutchreport.com on April 3 during the run up in PIVX. Now that it has come back down to earth it is interesting to look in the rearview mirror.

Since the start of March, the market capitalization of the cryptocurrency PIVX has grown a whopping 2150% growing from a mere $2M to over $43M in under thirty days. This phenomenal growth caused it to pop up on our radar and really intrigues us as to why it is growing so exponentially. Is there really something here or is this just a pump and dump?

In "The Hutch Report - Volume 1 - Insights from the Top 50 Wealth Management Institutions" we reported that there are hundreds of cryptocurrencies in circulation. There are more being launched all the time. According to coinmarketcap.com, the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies in circulation combined is currently on the order of $25.2B, with BTC (Bitcoin) clearly dominating with 67.1% market share and corresponding market cap of $16.9B. BTC is followed by Ethereum which has a market cap of $4.5B and Ripple with $721M. PIVX is now number 17 on the list at about $45M and given the recent pop it is experiencing, may even move up to 16th or 15th place by the time this post is published.

The cryptocurrency market is a fascinating mash-up of technologies, philosophies, economics and ideologies. Most share the concept of privacy and freedom. The reason for the proliferation of cryptocurrencies is probably due not to just one but a variety of forces. In most cases the driving force behind the creation of a cryptocurrencies is that they are iterations and forks (Forking is to take the source code from an open source software program and develop an entirely new program) of others in an attempt to make improvements on prior versions of a cryptocurrency. In some cases, they may also just be launched by folks looking to cash in on a growing trend and execute pump and dumps, however, due to the nature of the communities that get involved in supporting a cryptocurrency it is doubtful that the ones that are not established with a strong charter will ultimately not survive. One should always be vigilant particularly with the lower market cap cryptocurrencies which may be more susceptible to a simple pump and dump scheme. For example, a cryptocurrency with a low market cap of less than $10K could be easily popped up by someone investing $5k into it, all of a sudden the currency has grown 150%. Attracted by the sudden spike, unconscious speculators may jump on the currency, causing it to spike even more. Meanwhile, the original investor then can dump it and leave the later investors holding the bag.

When it was first launched in 2016, PIVX was launched as Darknet (DNET). The community realized that Darknet was associated with a more, sometimes nefarious side of the Internet called darknet which is the hidden internet available through anonymous routing platforms such as Tor. In order to eliminate any confusion, the cryptocurrency was re-branded at the start of 2017 as PIVX (Private Instant Verified Transaction). PiVX is based on the bitcoin core and is a fork branched from Dash which itself was an initial fork from bitcoin. The PIVX manifesto at https://www.pivx.org emphasizes privacy, freedom, technology along with community based and inclusive governance. The key issues which PIVX seems to address are improvements in privacy along with transaction and verification times.

BTC transactions are not anonymous and based on a cryptographic address or pseudonym. All transactions are completely public and include the cryptographic address (or pseudonym). All it takes is for that cryptographic address to be traced to a computer and user and the person can be identified. PIVX apparently provides options to enable transactions with a greater degree of privacy.

A PIVX transaction can take about 60 seconds to complete and verify which is incredibly favorable when compared with Dash transactions which take about 150 seconds. Both PIVX and Dash are much quicker than Bitcoin which can now take several hours to have a confirmed transaction. The growth in the transaction delay is due to the growth in the size of the blockchain and the increasing amount of time and processing power to process blockchain transactions.

Another big difference with PIVX from Bitcoin is that coins are not mined and not based on Proof of Work, but based rather upon Proof of Stake. This eliminates the resource and hardware intensive dependency on mining and instead members of the PIVX community are rewarded by holding onto a required minimum number of PIVX tokens in a masternode and keeping them connected to the internet. The minimum amount of PIVX to run a masternode is 10'000. At the start of February, the cost to set-up a masternode was about $76. Today, that cost is now approaching $10'000.

Apparently there is also some mathematical limits to the number of masternodes that can be set-up and run each year and the limit for 2017 is calculated to be 2184. With the increased buzz on PIVX it appears that there has also been a bit of a landgrab going on in order to get masternodes set-up. This begs the question of when the great masternode wars will start? What incentives are there for masternode holders not to attack or create DDOS attacks on other masternode owners, in order to both increase their share of PoS processing and rewards as well as staking a masternode spot? We have not yet found the answer to this question yet ...

So why has PIVX suddenly increased so much? We think it has to do with increased market awareness as a result of the recent re-branding, the buzz created around this, as well as a probable landgrab around a limited annual supply of masternodes that can be established each year. It still remains to be seen if this is a sustainable trend or if this was just a pop due to the buzz that will then recede and whether or not the PIVX community will turn their servers to other currencies or keep their masternodes and staking wallets. According to pivx.org, the community has some aggressive plans for 2017 to increase security and transaction flexibility. If the PIVX community is successful in these developments it should help to keep up the growth trajectory of PIVX in terms of both market share and mindshare.

Note: We remind you that cryptocurrencies are not legal tender, are not backed by any government and therefore no government protections provided to accounts and value balances. This article is for entertainment and information only and does not constitute an offer to invest nor investment advice.