Daily Crypto Market Watch: A Handful of Altcoins Rally as the Top 10 Cryptocurrencies Continue to Trade Sideways

The State of The Market — October 22, 2018  

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BTC: $6,493.90 (-0.66%) 

ETH: $204.72 (-1.12%) 

USDT: $0.988 (+0.60%)  

The overall cryptocurrency market has continued its sideways, range-bound trading throughout the weekend and during today’s early trading hours. Bitcoin (BTC) has fluctuated between $6,450 and $6,500 and Ethereum continues to trade between $198 and $206. Tether (USDT) is slowly reapproaching the dollar peg ($1.00) as it currently trades at $0.988. There are 2 coins in the top 100 that are up by more than 20 percent in the last 48-hours. Ravencoin (RVN) is up 52.81% and trading at $0.0554 and Veritaseum (VERI) is up 24.2% and trading at $37.94. Basic Attention Token (BAT) is also up 57.5% over the past 7 days and currently trades at $0.279.  

In other news, Bitmain released a patch which allows miners to activate ‘Overt AsicBoost’ on the Bitmain Antminer S9 miner. The patch allows the Antminer S9 to operate with a 13% energy savings and it could also provide Bitcoin miners with a much needed competitive edge against industrial miners. Also, a report by CryptoCompare found that more than 85 percent of cryptocurrencies are controlled by their developers. The report also claimed that 55 percent of the surveyed cryptocurrencies were fully centralized and the remaining 30 percent were semi-centralized.  

1) The relatively obscure Ravencoin (RVN) project has seen its price surge up in value over the past week, fueled by its recent listing on the popular cryptocurrency exchange Binance. What is even more noteworthy is that the project was listed on the exchange without putting forward a listing fee, which had been a controversial topic for Binance in the past. When RVN was initially listed on Binance it was trading around $0.014, but after several days and some promotional tweets from the Binance CEO, RVN is trading at $0.04215, increasing in value by more than 200%.   

2) Tether (USDT) tokens are quickly accumulating into a wallet address controlled by Kraken as this is one of the few places where traders can convert the stablecoin into U.S. dollars. Currently, Kraken’s wallet shows a balance of 47.8 million USDT and this makes the exchange the eighth-most valuable wallet to hold USDT. Two weeks ago the exchange had only $21.6 million in USDT and the balance fluctuated between 10 million to 24 million USDT from December 2017 through the end of September. On October 15 USDT fell to its lowest price in 18-months as the price dipped to $0.85 on Kraken. As this occurred, Kraken saw its highest ever trading volume in USDT.   

3) San Francisco-based startup Token has announced the launch of TokenX, a regulated and insured stablecoin on Stellar Blockchain. TokenX has partnered with Alliance Trust to act as its escrow for holding funds. These funds are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) up to $25 Million. Once verified, users can purchase 30 different stablecoins using Ethereum and Stellar. TokenX is also bringing support for Ethereum blockchain later.