So - in Europe we woke up to this amazing tragedy seeing almost all crypto currencies fall.
Many things are weird or hard to grasp - so here are my ramblings - if you have any ideas, please share them:
bitcoin: Really an exit? And a weird top trading pair?
image as always thanks to CoinMarketCap
So besides 3 trading pairs, according to this image here, bitcoin (BTC) seems to be being traded against regular currencies such as the USD, EUR, KRW and CNY.
So as the price for BTC continues to drop it can only mean, users are putting their coins back to their regular currency such as USD, EUR, KRW and CNY? Are they taking profits or are they leaving?
First I thought it would mainly be the Korean exchanges, where users were taking profits as they were the ones that were pumping a lot into it the last weeks - but they are relatively even with all other markets.
Interesting is the high volume of XRP/BTC (112 million USD) - all on Poloniex. So given that BTC is declining, people are selling BTC for Ripple (XRP)? Now? So many? Or are they selling Ripple and then converting it into USD/EUR/KRW/CNY?
Ripple would not sell its currency to its bank clients through Polo, would it? I mean - that would be weird, right?
So - these 112 million going mainly from BTC to XRP must be normal people betting on a profit to be made with Ripple in the short, medium or long term - or pulling out their profits?
All other coins are taking a beating, too!
So, yes, almost all, of course - at least when taking the screenshots, some seemed to be gaining, but lets focus on the overall majority, that is loosing 20% and upwards as I write this:
sreen thanks to Bittrex exchange
So almost all other crypto currencies (altcoins) are red. And really loosing a lot in the last 2 days - Ethereum as the biggest lost about 24% in the last 24h. Most other coins roughly 30%.
In most cases, you can only sell an altcoin against the bitcoin, so you would have an altcoin/bitcoin trading pair and the signal for stats would be a demand for bitcoin - but as we seen above, bitcoin is being sold more than bought - so all this money from altcoins seems to be directly going out of the crypto sphere.
Where will it stop if it stops?
When I entered this very own sphere end of 2016, according to coinmarketcap all currencies and assets monitored by them, where worth roughly 20-25 billion - at least I remember my first shares thoughts saying that ;-)
So - the 24th of May we were at 91 billion, it climbed 4 billion alone that day...so something really seemed crazy.