Hi and thanks for following Solume.io! While market is recovering from last week’s bloodbath, check out this new edition of our Crypto Digest!

Ethereum is The New Bitcoin

“The Weiss rating is what happens when traditional bankers think they understand crypto.” —Ran Neuner twitted. And you can be sure, he wasn’t alone in this wave of outrage over the recently published first-ever rating of 74 cryptocurrencies from Weiss Ratings.

Riccardo "fluffyblockchain" Spagni on Twitter

My rating of the Weiss Ratings: F-

So what’s the madness behind it?

• None of cryptocurrencies received A “excellent” rating.
• Bitcoin gets C+ “fair” rating, as well as DASH and ARK.
• The only coins rated B “good” are Ethereum and EOS.
• Cardano with yet-to-be-released product gets B-, as well as STEEM which enjoys growing adoption of its Steemit platform.
• Ripple received “fair” C rank along with Dogecoin that initially was launched as a Joke Coin.
• Electroneum with plagiazed whitepaper gets C-, while Monero is rated C.

Weiss based their ranking on four factors: risk, reward, technology, and fundamental aspects of adoption and security. But if Weiss are so smart, they have known they had it coming from the crypto community:

Mit Lear on Twitter

@fluffypony The story behind ratings: ratings= ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E'] coins ={} for coin in cryptocurrencies: coins[coin] = random.choice(ratings) print('Legit Weiss ratings, certified by @officialmcafee ') for cryptocurrency,rating in coins.items(): print(cryptocurrency,rating)

Reverend Ripple on Twitter

The Reverend was puzzled by the Weiss Crypto ratings as it shows our nascent market is still outside the reach of understanding by the larger, more established Financial world Giving equal standing to so many cryptos is simply irresponsible Equating Doge to #XRP? #XRP_Believer

Bitcoin Market Journal on Twitter

According to Weiss Cryptocurrency Ratings, Monero is a C and Electroneum is a C-. The Electroneum whitepaper plagiarized the CryptoNote paper, and the Electroneum dev team is so inept they did not know 0-fee transactions would be a bad idea. 🙄Yeah, this is a close call.🙄 https://t.co/XnUw6iSTxm

But jokes aside, Charles Hoskinson from IOHK tweeted:

Charles Hoskinson on Twitter

Any rating that doesn't give Bitcoin an A has got some screws loose. Nearly ten years of wealth creation, innovation, massive growth, proven resiliency against crashes and billions worth of infrastructure. And all without a leader. Bitcoin is the standard

Some of the ranks were surprising, and social volume for featured coins went up 200%. Take EOS for an example here:

The strongest reaction without a doubt came from James Clayton who decided to take matters in his own hands and release his very own version of crypto rating awarding nine coins, including Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero, with the highest A rating. Very generous of you James!

What are your thoughts? Are you a Weiss’ or a James’? Please comment below.

Bitcoin.org Update — The Latest BTC — BCH Drama

Since Bitcoin first hard forked in 2017, we’ve seen millions of “what-real-bitcoin-is” discussions between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash holders. Seems that pointing out slow transactions, poor adoption, high fees, lack of decentralization, etc never gets old in crypto.

This week the world has seen another page of the BTC vs BCH saga. On Monday, users spotted minor update on Bitcoin.org, that eliminated “fast transactions” and “low fees” part of BTC’s features.

Fair enough, Bitcoin’s transactions fees have been extremely high, and strong emphasis webside had made on “fast and cheap” operation doesn’t seem to meet the reality anymore.

Minor website update sparked major reaction in social media.

And here we go again:

Despite the fact that now description on the website is less misleading, social media voices still have something to complain about:

BTC supporters however pin their hopes on upcoming Lighting Network proposed as a solution to the Bitcoin scalability problems and said to be capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network at a low transaction fee.

Ben Davenport ⚡️ on Twitter

All the Bitcoin devs I know are either playing with Lightning or trying to find time to play with Lightning. Mainnet continues to grow rapidly, even with alpha quality releases that will lose people money. Developer enthusiasm = huge early indicator of long term success.

Throughout this entire mess, our algorithms successfully spotted a 64% growth in BTC’s social volume:

The Dogecoin’s Story

If you’re around crypto for a while, you’ve probably also wondered what is up with that coin with a dog logo.

Started off as a meme-based joke coin, Doge unsurprisingly got lots of love from the crypto community (and a lot of humor, too). It’s supposed to be a fun and easy to use internet currency. And that’s it. There is a strong philosophy behind the coin: “1 Doge = 1 Doge, so why worry about USD/BTC exchange rates?”. And there is a strong community responsible for bringing much value to the coin. Such wow.

Despite the joke, Doge broke 2-billion market cap on early January. Later on, it lost more than half of its value during the last week horror show and is now touching 800M.

Feel like you need some Doges in your crypto pocket? That’s how you get them:

• Buy them on one of the exchanges
• Mine them
• Get tipped in Goges.

According to our data, Dogecoin’s social volume reached amazing 2235 points on January, 8, which brought it to our hot TOP 5 for a few days (just check out the chart below).

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and have a great weekend!

Yours,

Polina

Community Manager at Solume.io

Solume’s Weekly Crypto Digest #3 was originally published in Solume.io on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What a week! Definitely made all of us in crypto hold our breath. In case you’ve missed any of the hottest news, here are our picks for the TOP-3 stories on social and public media.

Global Market Decline — Top 20 Coins Losing 13%

$200 billion dissipated in thin air this Tuesday when crypto market cap crashed to as low as $536 billion.

Bitcoin price dropped below $11,000 for the first time since December 5. At the same time, Bitcoin’s market cap has shrunk to $192 billion with a dominance index of 36,4%.

No wonder such changes reflected in Bitcoin’s +50% social volume at Solume.io.

All major altcoins suffered double-digit percentage losses as well, however, as of writing, the TOP 20 coins bounced back under way to the moon.

Some crypto influencers posted that mid-January was predictable, based on the previous years’ data

Others factors for this bloodbath were voiced too:

• Rumors around Chinese and South Korean markets ban.
• Large number of new investors that have come to the market over past few months.
• Upcoming Chinese New Year

John McAfee tweeted:

John McAfee on Twitter

Everyone Relax! The Crypto dip was caused by Mike Bell of JP Morgan claiming Governments could ban cryptocurrencies. Well ... how? This is the same company that called BTC a fraud. It's a bank FFS. They are rightfully terrified of what we are doing. But it can't be stopped.

Just like any crisis, some players lost their pants while others bought a whole wardrobe for pennies. What’s your bloodbath story? Share with by commenting below and let’s make our own “bloodbath survival guide”.

BitConnect to Close its Lending & Exchange Platforms

Ironically, our top social volume gainer (from 118 to 2619) this week hasn’t earned its name due to the global market decline.

On Tuesday, BitConnect announced that it closes its lending platform and will close an exchange service within five days after the announcement. Afterwards, BitConnect.co will continue operating as a wallet service and educational website.

BitConnect finds many reasons for this decision:

• DDoS attacks to the website
• Negative posts in public media that “created a lack of confidence in the platform”.
• Cease and Desist letters from regulators in Texas and North Carolina claiming that BitConnect was engaging in the sale of unregistered securities.

Though BitConnect blames regulators and media, social media voices accuse the company of using a Ponzi scheme.

Peter McCormack on Twitter

BitConnect was obviously a Ponzi Scheme: - Those who ran it are dicks - Those who promoted it are dicks - The exchanges who sold it are dicks I feel sorry for the unsophisticated investors who were sold the dream. Forget DYOR, it happens because some people don't know how to.

But harsh criticism aimed at BitConnect isn’t new. Take Charlie Lee and Michael Novogratz here for example:

Michael Novogratz on Twitter

BitConnect really seems like a scam. an old school ponzi ... bad actors hurt the community. period. #bitcoin #ether

Charlie Lee [LTC] on Twitter

I've been asked what I think about BitConnect. From the surface, seems like a classic ponzi scheme. I wouldn't invest in it and wouldn't recommend anyone else to. I follow this rule of thumb: "If it looks like a 🦆, walks like a 🦆, and quacks like a 🦆, then it's a ponzi."

Right after their announcement, BCC lost 90% of its price.

Despite all of the above plus some technical difficulties, BitConnect X ICO will surprisingly continue as planned.

And while BitConnect holders are evaluating their losses…

Francis Pouliot on Twitter

These are actual digital gravestones of Bitconnect bagholders having their savings evaporate before their eyes. The bitconnect subreddit is a cemetery. R.I.P. 💀 There will be more in many different subreddits.

… BitConnect is hoping to get BCC’s value back.

BitConnect on Twitter

We still expect BitConnect coin (BCC) to gain its value back and you can hold your coins in the website wallet or transfer them to a QT wallet. We are still supporting BCC to gain its value back. @bitconnect

OMNI Accepts $25M Worth Investment in $XRP

Omni, a Silicon Valley storage startup behind the OMNI token, puts a big bet on $XRP by accepting the majority of $25-million investment from Ripple in company’s cryptocurrency, as announced on Tuesday.

Omni on Twitter

More big news from Omni HQ-we just closed a $25MM+ round of funding with @Ripple, with participation from Ripple execs and @HighlandCapital. We're beyond excited for the growth and expansion this capital makes possible. 🚀 https://t.co/P6rRVDsBUv

Omni CEO Tom McLeod stated that, Omni is looking for the long-term benefits involved with receiving venture funding in crypto.

Apparently, such a move serves as a workaround to traditional Series C and Series D investment rounds by benefiting from XRP’s price rise Omni is hoping for.

Noteworthy, XRP lost 50% of its price the same day the partnership was announced, following the global market decline. Howerew, as of press time, the cryptocurrency has almost recovered its value and is currently trading $1.63.

Such news made Omni one of Solume’s top 5 trending coins by social volume on Wednesday.

That’s it for today. Have a great weekend everyone.

Don’t forget to share your thoughts in comments and subscribe to our Twitter and Telegram.

Quick annoncement: Soon we will be adding a bunch of new features to Solume.io and you are invited to join our Beta community and get an early access to all of them! If you want to join, reach us at contact@solume.io, write a few sentences about what Solume’s features you use most and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Yours,

Polina

Community Manager at Solume.io

Solume’s Weekly Crypto Digest #2 was originally published in Solume.io on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

RaiBlocks to Be Listed on Binance

Last Friday, Binance finished the fifth round of “Community Coin per Month” and announced RaiBlocks (XRB) as the winner of January voting. The prize for the winner? That’s righ — free listing placement on Binance.

binance on Twitter

Binance January Community Coin - #RaiBlocks (XRB) https://t.co/xsNstnWJVB

The exact time of XRB’s appearance on Binance is yet to be announced, but Reddit users estimate that it may take 7 to 10 days, as it happened with the previous-month winner, ETHLend (LEND).

To those unfamiliar with Binance, it was founded in mid-2017 and has quickly become one of the largest exchanges by trading volume (with more than 7M unique visitors per month, according to SimilarWeb). In fact, Binance is so successful, it had to temporary close registration on its platform.

Goes without saying that being listed on such an exchange is an important milestone for RaiBlocks that can skyrocket its value.

According to our measures, the news was warmly welcomed in social media and led to a very positive trend in XRB’s social volume and sentiment.

CoinMarketCap Decision Exludes South Korean Exchanges from Price Calculation Caused Market Decline

On Monday, CoinMarketCap announced through its twitter account that it had excluded three South Korean exchanges, namely Bithumb, Coinone, and Korbit, from its price calculations.

CoinMarketCap on Twitter

This morning we excluded some Korean exchanges in price calculations due to the extreme divergence in prices from the rest of the world and limited arbitrage opportunity. We are working on better tools to provide users with the averages that are most relevant to them.

Such an unannounced move led to a major confusion, as CoinMarketCap reflected a significant marked decline as soon as calculation changes went into effect. This confusion caused holders to panic and sell their assets, which led to an actual price decline.

One of the coins that got affected most by CoinMarketCap’s decision was Ripple (XRP) which is sold in large volumes in South Korea. A CoinMarketCap chart shows a $20-billion market cap decline for the cryptocurrency within a 15-minute interval, which allowed Ethereum to overtake Ripple in the CoinMarketCap chart.

David Schwartz, Chief Cryptographer at Ripple, posted in his Twitter account:

David Schwartz on Twitter

Coinmarketcap's decision to exclude Korean prices from the displayed XRP price made the price appear to drop, likely triggering some panic selling. Look closely at the data and don't be mislead.

Such a move without any warning caused a wave of outrage in the crypto community, accusing CoinMarketCap of market manipulation and even testing their influence on the crypto market. Following CoinMarketCap’s move, Live Coin Watch, another go-to crypto price index, will soon be adding an optional filter that excludes data from Korean exchanges from price averages as well.

Live Coin Watch on Twitter

@ItsLevalicious No we don't 🙂 our data is from 40+ exchanges' API's, including Korean exchanges (which are traditionally higher in price). We're adding the option to remove Korean exchanges from the weighted price volume soon, if you wish to remove them 😃👍

CoinMarketCap’s decision generated a lot of buzz in social media. Ripple’s social volume at Solume.io reflected a significant growth (+130% as compared to the previous day):

For our newly acquainted readers, social volume is a measurement based on the quantity and quality of social media mention of the cryptocurrency. By choosing the day or a time period you can get familiar with all social media posts and discussions sorted by post timing or upvotes.

Ripple to Partner with MoneyGram

Another splash of social media buzz (+178% in Solume’s social volume) around Ripple was sparked by the recent announcement of the upcoming partnership between Ripple and MoneyGram.

Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghous tweeted that Moneygram will now use $XRP tokens in their payment flows.

Brad Garlinghouse on Twitter

@MoneyGram @Ripple We're proud to work with companies like @Moneygram that value innovative payments solutions - and we'll continue to champion xRapid with customers that value improved speed and cost. https://t.co/zXOoVft9eq

MoneyGram is planning on using Ripple’s new xRapid service intended to provide transparent, fast and reliable money transfers to users, as well as liquidity to the company. As for Ripple, the company that recently faced questions about the XRP’s real-world purpose has a chance to demonstrate their ability to provide fast money transfers at a low cost.

The announcement of the strategic tie-up had an immediate impact on $XRP’s price which hit the $2 mark soon after the notice.

That’s it for today. Have a great weekend everyone.

Would be happy to hear your feedback on this digest.

Yours,

Polina

Solume’s Weekly Crypto Digest was originally published in Solume.io on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We recommend to start by sorting coins according to the rate of change in social volume over the last 24 hours. Unless you have specific coin in mind, you can focus on looking at coins that have significantly grown in social volume, but have also had a negative change of price in the last 24 hours.

Another criteria is the actual social volume in the last 24 hours and market cap. The bigger the market and the community are(high social volume suggests activity of a large community), the bigger the change needs to be in order to indicate upcoming market change.

After choosing two or three potential candidates, visit each of their coin-pages. In their coin-pages you can play with the zoom. Activating the price curve will help you get a view of the relationship between coin price and coin social volume.

In the coin page below the chart are curated social media posts from Twitter and reddit. Since the list is composed of sources gathered from multiple filtered sources (and multiple sub-sources), a quick look on the list can indicate whether the rise in social volume expresses a positive or a negative sentiment [We’re working on adding the sentiment analysis feature, and it is coming soon 😁 ]

The next step would be to check the authenticity of social volume. While we do filter spam, we still recommend sifting through collection of posts. Good indicators would be the measure of up-votes/likes and language diversity. Monotonous posts/tweets may indicate potential pump and dump activity. Another possible indication of market manipulation attempts comes in the form of social media channel diversity. The more widespread the social chatter over a certain coin of an ICO, the more chances that it’s genuine.

It is worth considering the fact that even if you identify a pumping activity, it might be a good idea to get into position; however do bear in mind the risks involved and be sure to set your stop loss.

Below are a few examples from our archive that show events where rising social curves preceded rising price curves.

It’s important to clarify that the hints provided above are not a conclusive strategy. It’s a way to use solume.io and we think it can help our users gain more value and identify more opportunities.

We would love to hear your feedback and ideas on how to use solume.io and make it better.

You can reach us by mail, or tweet us @solumeIO

Love you,

Adam

How to Find Potentially Undervalued Coins with Solume.io was originally published in Solume.io on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In order to create a better experience to our audience, here’s a small user’s guide to Solume.io

What can you find at Solume.io?

Solume.io is currently divided into two pages: the main page and coin page.

The Main Page

On the main page you can:

• Get a quick view of trending posts about trending coins [1].
• Learn how many times each coin has been mentioned on social media in the last 24 hours [2](we call this “Social Volume”, and it denotes the number of coin mentions we on Twitter and Reddit), and see the ratio of change in the last 24 hours [3].
• Sort the coins to see which have undergone significant changes in their social volume in the last 24 hours by hitting the Social Volume Change 24hbutton.[4].
• Watch social volume mini-charts for each coins (this isn’t included in mobile) [5].
• Search your coin and gain direct access to its page [6].
• Sign up for updates (please do, don’t miss out our updates!)

The Coin Page

Each coin has its own page, but all coin pages are built the same.

On the coin page you can:

• Watch the social volume curve of each coin, along a time line of 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, and 3 months [1]. You can also go back and forth along that time line.
• Display a price curve in order to study the relationship between social volume and price in BTC in USDT [2](in some coins, the price curve is not yet available, but will be soon). You can also watch a breakdown of the social volume curve to a Reddit or a Twitter curve [3].
• Use the complimentary coin <> USD calculator [4].

• View top trending social media content (Reddit and Twitter, currently) related to each coin, in time frames of 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, and 3 months. Content can be sorted by date or popularity [5].

How to get social media data directly to your google sheets portfolio?

Via CryptoFinance, you can get social volume count and change over the last 24 hours.

We provide social volume in the last 24 hours, social volume change over the last 24 hours, as well as on option to limit the requested data to Reddit or Twitter.

In order to have Solume.io data integrated into your spreadsheet, you’ll need to add the CryptoFinance add-on and follow the instructions below.

Get volume and change data across both Twitter and Reddit:

• Call =CRYPTOFINANCE("SOLUME:BTC") to get Bitcoin social volume in the last 24 hours. This is similar to calling =CRYPTOFINANCE("SOLUME:BTC", "volume").
• Call =CRYPTOFINANCE("SOLUME:BTC", "change") to get Bitcoin social volume change over the last 24 hours.

Get volume and change data on Twitter only:

• Call =CRYPTOFINANCE("SOLUME:NEO", "twitter_volume") to get Neo social volume over the last 24 hours on Twitter only.
• Call =CRYPTOFINANCE("SOLUME:NEO", "twitter_change") to get Neo social volume change over the last 24 hours on Twitter only.

Get volume and change data on Reddit only:

• Call =CRYPTOFINANCE("SOLUME:LTC", "reddit_volume") to get Litecoin social volume over the last 24 hours on Reddit only.
• Call =CRYPTOFINANCE("SOLUME:LTC", "reddit_change") to get Litecoin social volume change over the last 24 hours on Reddit only.

Next post, upcoming features

Our upcoming features will cover sentiment analysis, more social media sources, more coins and news aggregation. Stay tuned.

In our next post we’ll talk about interesting conclusions that can be made with Solume.io.

We would love to hear your feedback. We’re available at contact@solume.io

Adam

** Number icons in the photos were made by Pixel Buddha from www.flaticon.com

How to know where crypto markets are headed with Solume.io: the basics was originally published in Solume.io on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.