Top crypto risers and losers of the fall
07:59, 20 December 2019
Back in June, many analysts predicted a massive rally by the end of the year. Yet, this crypto fall has brought only disappointment for all the top 10 coins. It's not all doom and gloom, however: there were massive gains for some, too. Read our breakdown of the fall season's successes and failures.
The luckiest winners
Centrality (CENNZ): 824.48%, current market cap 0 M
Centrality attracted lots of attention when its ICO raised over $100m in just six minutes in January 2018. The New Zealand-based startup plans to build a dApp marketplace where blockchain projects can communicate and assist each other. More than a year and a half later, the platform isn't there yet. However, in October, Centrality launched a staking and referral program, and that caused a sudden spike of interest. It's hard to say how genuine the trading volumes are, so in the absence of a full-scale product CENNZ can go both ways.
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Synthetix (SNX): 158.5%, current market cap $161 M
Synthetix's recent rise is a great example of the power that Crypto Twitter has. The platform proposes to trade crypto, commodities, indices etc. through so-called “synthetic assets”. On Oct 16, a SNX holder noticed that a certain wallet address was buying a lot of SNX tokens. Remarkably, it turned out that the wallet belonged to the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. The community is still waiting for an official confirmation. SNX has grown over 1700 per cent in 2019, but its product – while operational - is nowhere near finished.
VeChain Thor (VET): 79.8%, current market cap 4 M
VET surged after it was announced that its CEO Sunny Lu will be a keynote speaker at CoinMarketCap's first global conference, The Capital, to take place in Singapore. This will certainly gain the relatively unknown project lots of international exposure. VeChain proposes its own blockchain for managing supply chains and apparently already has Walmart and BMW among its partners.
Cosmos (ATOM): 75.9%, current market cap 1 M
Cosmos is building a blockchain interoperability protocol called IBC. ATOM owes its latest price spike to the announcement that it will be listed on Binance US for free. The previous, smaller surge in September was caused by the news that Binance was considering the coin for listing among many others. As a pure infrastructure project with an obvious value, Cosmos can continue its growth – as long as there is enough development activity.
0x (ZRX): 62%, current market cap 8 M
Decentralized exchange protocol 0x delivered two pieces of great news this fall that boosted its price. One was the launch of OpenZKP – an open-source protocol that allows contract parties to verify data without revealing it. The second was the upcoming integration with the platform Augur – it will supposedly allow liquidity to flow from the standard crypto market into prediction markets. This sounds promising enough (though complicated) to increase market trust in ZRX: the coin was definitely trending, not pumping.
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The biggest losers
Bitcoin: -24.45%
While Bitcoin's latest drop isn't nearly as bad as those suffered by many other coins, it's the one we are watching most closely. It looks ever more dramatic on a shorter time frame: -21.5% in just one month. The drop is largely fuelled by the mounting selling pressure coming from spot exchanges, with occasional large individual sell-offs (like that miner who sold $17 million worth of BTC on Nov 20). Among the key fundamental reasons for the falling crypto prices is the new round of China's anti-crypto crusade. There was a brief surge in late October, when Bitcoin recovered over $2000 in just a few hours, following Xi Jinping's pro-blockchain statements. However, the hopes were dashed as President Xi slammed cryptocurrencies again on Nov 19.
Bitcoin Gold (BTG): -43.87%, current market cap 7.5 M
After often outperforming BTC in September, BTG took a nosedive:
The ASIC-resistant hard fork of Bitcoin used to be in the crypto top 5, but now it languishes on the 45th spot. According to the founders, this is because Bitcoin Gold has never paid any exchange or media for listings or coverage.
Ethereum Classic (ETC): -38.4%, current market cap 4.5 M
The first half of 2019 was good for ETC, but for the past 5 months it's been going from bad to worse. On the fundamental side of things, the coin has seen very little new development since the main dev team left in December 2018. On the other hand, if Ethereum decides to implement the anti-ASIC consensus algorithm ProgPOW, ASIC miners might shift to Ethereum Classic.
Zcash (ZEC): -38.23%, current market cap 0 M
Zcash managed to stay on the uptrend for 10 days longer than Bitcoin back in late June, but its fall was more serious overall: the privacy-oriented coin lost over 66 per cent in the past 12 months. The situation worsened in August, when ZEC got delisted by Coinbase UK. Zcash allows users to “shield (hide) the details of their operations, which doesn't sit well with regulators.
DASH (DASH): -34.94%, current market cap 8 M
This fall, DASH got delisted by exchanges OKex Korea and Upbit. If you've been following crypto market news, you might know about the latest ruling by FATF (Financial Action Task Force) – an international organization created to fight money laundering. All crypto businesses (including exchanges) will need to collect and share users' data when transacting with $1000 or more. This can be disastrous for privacy coins like DASH, Zcash and Monero. However, the implementation of the new rules is up to local governments, so it remains to be seen if DASH manages to recover its losses.
As we've seen, the main rising crypto coins this fall were all relative newcomers. Meanwhile, all the top 10 are firmly in the red. Has Bitcoin reached the bottom? Will we see a Christmas rally in 2019? Follow our updates to find out.
Contributor: Alisa Orlova
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