The three-eyed raven
Market Report: 22nd Oct. 2018 — Subscribe to our newsletter.
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CRYPTO NOTE
The daily view from our desk
Mondays are for our inner goddesses and our internet to manifest itself in a moment. Huh? Mondays are for paying your grandfather for being old. What? Feed bots countless hours of TED Talks and make them spit words like that. Steve-O? Still an unbelievable jackass. Massive spiders? No need for Hollywood special effects.
THE THREE-EYED RAVEN
“The secret of a pump lies in the ear of who accumulates it” — Edgar A. Poemp
Despite the cries that crypto markets are dead, some top 100 alternative cryptoassets have been giving alt-season-like returns — with Raven’s RVN appreciating more than 100% since Friday — prompting CryptoGainz to joke about ‘JOMO’, the joy of missing out on these hard-to-predict pumps. If you were late to the party, CryptoGat recommends taking profits and hints the declining volume might make the messenger bird stop flying.
More interestingly for the less speculative ones, Willy Woo visualises how Bitcoin’s protocol has been “quietly improving”. But, even though some believe November will provide a new trend, consolidation might still take some time, as Salt reminds. So, for now, DonAlt suggests shorting the yearly-lows this early doesn’t provide a good risk-return ratio, and one can wait for confirmation without losing a significant headstart.
MAKE ETHEREUM GREAT AGAIN
Did Donald Trump really postponed the dApp platform’s major upgrade?
Last Friday, Ethereum’s core developers publicly met to discuss the implementation of ‘Constantinople’. The hard-fork that will upgrade the decentralised platform so it can better scale — and reduce the block reward from 3 to 2 ether — was activated on a testnet on October 13th, but faced several bugs. The more complicated one resulted in a chain-split that worried some fans who fail to understand testbeds will break by definition.
Perhaps presciently, this bug was caused by a Donald Trump tweet submitted to the unworldly blockchain by a lottery dApp. Devs felt the pressure to make Ethereum great again and, during the call, decided to push back the hard-fork from this November to January or later. Meanwhile, the next update will come in two weeks, right after DevCon — the annual meeting of the ETH family — which starts next week in Prague.
WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR
Filter the noise and stay ahead of the pack
▪ CoinDesk’s first London meet-up is happening tomorrow in Shoreditch and will discuss “blockchains for good”. Registration is full but join the waiting list here and just show up.
▪ Awe & Wonder analysed bitcoin’s growth rates and used the s-curve theory to visualise the cycles between bull and bear markets. Read and share with John McAffee.
▪ More than 10,000 Dogecoin users have been scammed recently with the help of Trojan horses in cute canine apps. Wise shibas protect their doge, so check the details here.
WHAT TO READ TODAY
An insight a day could give you more profits to play
▪ EY doesn’t believe alt-season is here. The accounting and advisory firm studied 2017’s top ICOs and concludes only 13% have working products and 16% prototypes.
▪ If you like great visual reports, today’s newsletter is for you. In addition to the great EY slides above, check Fabric Ventures “State of the Token Market — 9 months into 2018”.
▪ Because pictures are not always louder than words, the New Yorker asks whether “Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the blockchain are transforming the world.” Great long read here.
FOUNDATIONAL TRIVIA
Because the building blocks of crypto needn’t be irrelevant
S-curves are used in many fields of knowledge to depict processes that start growing slowly and then accelerate exponentially before maturing. In business and technology, they are used to show how innovations spread.