Announcing Alte.Capital - Weekly what changed in crypto — January 2018

Happy New Year from the Alte.Capital. To kick the year off, we are pleased to announce that we are starting to ship our weekly “what changed” letter.

We are dedicating this to share the most important stuff according to us we’ve seen previous week in crypto world. Enjoy it every Monday morning and we are open to your feedback.

Further, stay tuned for upcoming plans related to sharing our trading tools for the crypto trading community in 2018!

Thank you!

Weekly what changed 15 — 22 January 2018

Whole week major drivers:

It was a very hard week for long-term holders. Especially for people who were early investors for ETH. The sheer amount of money in portfolios was much higher for this drop than previous ones. Comparing to July 2017 drop in absolute values it was much higher. Another reason is that the lower the price goes, the more people have to sell to cover 2017 year taxes.

Crypto-exchanges are overwhelmed. Popular crypto-exchange, Binance recently revealed that they added 250,000 new users in a single day. Kraken is onboarding 50,000 new accounts daily and they are logging an astonishing 10,000 new support tickets every day. Fortunately, it looks like problems with registering new accounts were solved last week. It’s possible again to open an account on Binance, Bitfinex and CEX.io.

Price action

On Monday and Tuesday (15–16th January) we have seen a decline of $130 billion which means the capitalization is $583 billion.

15–22 January week change

Since Wednesday the time for a change has come. Bitcoin and other recovered partly from losses and ended up week with 15–20% decline and marketcap around $574,546,000,000.

Swisscoin spam pump and dump campaign

Necurs, the world’s largest spam botnet, now sends millions of messages that inform about the Swisscoin. Spammers buy in advance for a low price and sell when the spam campaign raises the price.

Telegram ICO

Telegram, an encrypted messaging service, raised the target for coin offering to $2 billion. Telegram may raise $850 million in private sale this month and $1.15 billion in a subsequent public ICO in March. Telegram expects its “Grams” tokens to be listed in January 2019, or end of 2019 at the latest. This would be the first public ICO without even published whitepaper (at the time of writing). In our opinion Telegram team hasn’t started working on technology yet and may try to copy-paste technologies, ideas from other blockchain projects.

The largest Japanese bank is opening its own stock market

MUFG, the largest bank in Japan and the fourth largest in the world is planning to start its own stable coin with a peg 1:1 to Japanese Jen.

China plans to tighten the sanctions on cryptocurrencies trade

Chinese authorities seem to be not able to keep their citizens from cryptocurrency trading. Therefore they are planning to broaden the sanctions for national cryptographic trade (including OTC trade). There are speculations that the Internet police will block the local and international cryptocurrency trading websites.

Bitconnect shut down

Bitconnect Ponzi scheme was shut down after warnings from regulatory authorities in Texas. Bitconnect Coin (BCC) plunged 87% at the beginning of the week but on Thursday it jumped 300%.

South Korean government must accept the petition about cryptocurrencies

A petition about regulating cryptocurrencies garnered the minimum of signatures after being filed to South Korea’s presidential office on 28 December. That would force the government to give an official response to it. The petition asks the government to renounce proposed trading regulations that would ruin “a happy dream” that has been enabled by digital currencies. Some of the proposed regulations include banning anonymous virtual trading accounts, forbidding underaged investors and foreigners from investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on the Korean market, and even banning cryptocurrency trading outright.

Our next “What changed” is due on January 29th, 2018. Until then we look forward to hearing from you.

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