Hyped up Grin may not be a good investment for now
New privacy coin Grin has been seeing a lot of excitement upon its launch. Using a new algorithm, one-way aggregation signatures, makes transactions look as though they are mixed together, creating improved fungibility. This also makes tracking Grin transactions challenging.
Grin’s new technology is garnering lots of interest in privacy coin enthusiasts but not everyone feeling positive about this new coin. Grin’s launch could well be the most hyped crypto-project since ZCash. In its first week, prices have shot up tremendously and are extremely volatile, largely influenced by early mining. As of now, investing in Grin may not be a great idea. Reading about Grin and being in-the-know is sufficient.
Ripple sees steady rise in revenue
About 900 million new XRP has been added to Ripple’s circulation in Q4. Even if only half of it was sold, Ripple would still make a hefty $200 million in revenue.
In Q3 last year, Ripple’s TTM Revenue was at $500 million, a 5 fold increase compared to Q3 in 2017. Currently, XRP is the third largest ICO of all time, only falling behind EOS and Telegram.
Lightning Network works on improving scalability
Scalability has always been a huge concern in cryptocurrency. Bitcoin’s lack of scalability is a challenge its been faced with since its early beginnings. Lightning Network aims to solve this problem by allowing instant transactions to occur off-chain and settled on-chain.
On Lightning, small payments, metered payments and other payments between trusted parties can be processed quickly outside of the blockchain. This will offload the main chain and allow more transactions to be completed quickly and cheaply.
Concerns over BitMEX’ insurance fund
Founded in 2014, BitMEX is one of the most liquid Bitcoin derivatives. Its daily volume reaches a few billion dollars a day. BitMEX isn’t conservative when it comes to spending its profits. It rents the world’s most expensive office space and pours in money for ad campaigns.
Popular Bitcoin derivative BitMEX has been taking heat from their “insurance fund”. Over the past months, the fund has been steadily growing. Currently, BitMEX holds 21 350 bitcoins for insurance which is about 0.12% of total mined Bitcoins. That’s a huge leap compared to its 2 718 Bitcoins a year ago.
Currently, BitMEX’s insurance fund is sitting on a reserve of Bitcoins meant to counter situations of high volatility. The fund “grows from liquidations that were able to be executed in the market at a price better than the bankruptcy price of that particular position.” While there’s nothing wrong with having a strong reserve, many traders are concerned that the funds are overcapitalised and that BitMEX could monetise investor’s liquidations through the insurance fund.