Analysis of the Last Week in Blockchain
(October 24, 2016 — October 30, 2016)
Bitcoin, Ether, & Blockchain Asset Price Movement
Bitcoin rallied strongly last week. Beginning the week at $650 and closing at $700, the increase represented an overall weekly gain of 7.51%.
Year to date, bitcoin is now up 61.12%. Against the years low in January, bitcoin is up 95.11%, and against the year’s high in June, bitcoin is now down -8.88%.
Since the start of August just 3 months ago, bitcoin is now up 26.62%.
With over 15.952 million bitcoin mined at this point, the current price represents a total market cap of just over $11.1 Billion.
Ether fell dramatically relative to USD last week, beginning the week at about $12 and closing the week just under $10.50 to represent an overall loss of -12.46%.
Year to date, ether is up 1,001% as compared to the dollar after a massive early rise rise.
Given bitcoin’s extremely strong performance last week, the ether price relative to bitcoin fell -19.67%.
Year to date, ether’s value relative to bitcoin is up 751%.
Last week, the LBI rose about $11 from $183 to $194, representing an overall weekly gain of 5.92%.
Since its inception on January 1, 2015, the LBI is now up 94.00%, & since the start of the year, the LBI is now up 63.99%.
As of November 1, 2016, it looks like (LBI “Performance” tab) 7 existing LBI assets made the cut (over $50 Million market cap), STEEM fell out, and Augur REP was just short.
Last week was extremely volatile in the blockchain asset markets.
- BTC & LBI were the highest weekly performers of the assets featured above, up 8.97% & 5.92%, respectively.
- STEEM & XRP were the lowest weekly performers of the assets featured above, down -34.01% & -18.02%, respectively.
Blockchain News
Last week saw some major and exciting developments in the bitcoin and emerging blockchain asset markets.
Bitcoin Core released a new version of their software containing code for the official introduction of Segregated Witness to Bitcoin.
Segregated witness (segwit) is a soft fork that, if activated, will allow transaction-producing software to separate (segregate) transaction signatures (witnesses) from the part of the data in a transaction that is covered by the txid
The long awaited changes would allow numerous immediate benefits including the elimination of “transaction malleability” (reducing complexity for Bitcoin wallet and smart contract developers), increased data capacity per block, increased security for multisig, and more.
Estimates based on the transactions currently found in blocks indicate that if all wallets switch to using segwit, the network will be able to support about 70% more transactions, and also be able to support more of the advanced-style payments (such as multisig)
On November 15, 2016, miners will be able to signal their willingness to enforce segwit. In any subsequent 2,016 block period (about 2 weeks), if 95% of blocks signal support for segwit, the changes will be “locked-in”, and after 2,016 more blocks, miners will be able to produce blocks with segwit transactions on the main Bitcoin network. Also of note, if by November 15, 2017, segwit has not been activated, it will cease in eligibility for activation.
For more information on Segwit and the potential advantages and risks, check out Bitcoin Core’s benefits and costs pages, and an article on Bitcoin Magazine about the event.
Bitcoin trading volume has increase markedly in the past week and month as a whole.
The global composition continues to be dominated by chinese exchanges and trading to and from chinese yuan.
The Ethereum Core Developers had a meeting last week to discuss an upcoming hard fork to “change the database encoding of empty accounts so that they are not present at all anymore” to reduce data bloat on its blockchain.
Last week at Money20/20, Brian Armstrong (Founder & CEO of Coinbase) spoke on Ethereum, talking about topics including the timely transaction volume limitations between Bitcoin & Ethereum, the development communities composing the two, and the market size and potential for cryptocurrency in general.
Zcash, the newest blockchain asset to go live, was born this week with the creation of its genesis block and the start of mining and the distribution of block rewards (the native asset, ZEC) to miners.
Markets opened astronomically high as the demand far outweighed the tiny initial supply, fetching prices far north of several bitcoin or thousands of dollars. In the following guest article on Coindesk, I compared the similar supply structure of BTC vs. ZEC and several markets, including exchanges that currently trade ZEC, derivatives on future ZEC prices that began trading prior to the ZEC launch, and initial investors into the company behind the project and recipients of some of the current block rewards.
Golem released a new blog post summarizing their vision & value proposition, as well as a blog post on the economics of their native asset (Golem Network Token, “GNT”) intended to provide additional information and clarity surrounding their platform & upcoming crowdfunding (date still TBD). Their “release candidate” crowdfunding whitepaper can be seen here.
As an overview on investing beyond bitcoin into other blockchain assets, an article was published last week on About.com by Jack Tatar featuring a blockchain market overview, a comparison to more traditional alternative investments, Lawnmower & the LBI, and more.
-Alex Sunnarborg
Founder & CFO, Lawnmower.io
This post originally appeared as part of the weekly update on the Lawnmower Blog where you can view more stories and analysis on the blockchain space.
Disclaimer: All viewpoints are completely my own. Nothing presented represents the viewpoints, opinions, etc. of any corporation or organization and all data/charts/analyses are for illustrative and discussion purposes only and should not be construed or interpreted as fact, advice, recommendation, or anything of similar nature.
