Understanding the Cryptocurrency Market

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The cryptocurrency market really exploded in the past 18 months.  Words like Bitcoin and blockchain went from obscure technical terms understood by only a tiny segment of the population to becoming household terms.  This was truly a meteoric rise and also one of those rare opportunities to get in on the ground floor of pricing and experience astonishing gains in a short period of time.

Another one of the cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, gained in value from around $10 to over $1,000 within a span of a year.  Those that caught this wave early laughed all the way to the bank in the past year, if they were also smart enough to cash out at the right time.  All good things must come to an end and the same happened with the bubble in pricing of the cryptos.

While the currencies are still doing spectacularly well for those that got in on the ground floor, they are not doing well for those that got caught in the later frenzy in 2017.  Beyond just the cryptocurrencies themselves, there were also other fascinating developments in this overall space.  One must mention the rise of the ICO phenomenon.  ICO stands for initial coin offering and is styled after the traditional equity markets, where there is an initial public offering (IPO) of a stock for an entity.

Instead of being issued stock in a company, these ICOs provided coins instead.  These coins could have been Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), or even a brand new coin that the ICO may have been about itself.  This part of the market raised eyebrows for more than the typical reasons.  This is because now you have the cryptos and these new companies directly borrowing from traditional financial markets that are strictly regulated by governments and populated by big banks.  You can imagine that governments don’t like to give up control and nor do big banks want to give us their profits of business where they are already nicely entrenched.

There were other ripple effects from all of these developments in the overall ecosystem of cryptos in the form of hardware demand for specialized processors and computers that would help the coin miners do their work to cash in on the rising prices.  Video cards that had graphic processor units (GPU) from Nvidia rose up in price and supplies became highly limited.

The big bang or at least this portion of it is now over, but the future is just beginning for the cryptocurrency market.  Therefore, it behooves the agile investor to continue to gather their education in this space to look for future opportunities to do well with their money.  A solid place to reach about the altcoin exchange and position oneself is in this referenced website.  The technology and methods behind cryptos and blockchain have incredible potential for many markets and for the transformation of much that we’ve been doing in traditional ways for decades.  Keep a close eye here and wishing you the best in investing.