The latest recession in the cryptocurrency market has caused a sharp fall in the valuations of several altcoins, many of which are on the verge to get extinct.
Xapo President Ted Rogers recently said that 90% of the digital currencies in the cryptocurrency market are poised to get wiped out while predicting an impending recession to take place in the altcoin space. Rogers says that this lapse will give crypto enthusiasts a huge opportunity to buy Bitcoins at a discounted rate.
Roger’s views come just at a time when the crypto markets witnessed a heavy sell-off on Tuesday with the overall market cap going below $200, hitting its bottom for 2018. Altcoins have been the major contributors to Tuesday’s market crash with most of them losing 15-20% of their value over the last two days.
Just as the overall valuations of the cryptocurrency markets fell by nearly 80 percent since the beginning of this year, popular digital currencies like Ethereum, XRP, Bitcoin Cash, TRON, NEO, Dash and a few other have plunged by over 80 percent from their all-time highs.
This lapse in the altcoins has resulted in the growing Bitcoin dominance in the entire crypto market. For the first time in 2018, Bitcoin dominance has crossed 50 percent mark. The altcoins sell-off has been triggered by the continuous price reduction in Ethereum, as most of the digital currencies launched through ICOs last year are based on the Ethereum blockchain network.
Bitcoin Overtakes Gold in Terms of Settlement Volumes
Despite a sharp decline in the price of Bitcoin in the last eight months, crypto researcher Nic Carter notes that Bitcoin has still managed to overtake the over-the-counter (OTC) gold market in terms of volume settlement.
As per the clearing statistics presented by the London Bullion Market (LBMA), the global gold OTC market is on the way to settle $446 billion in 2018. On the other hand, Carter also presents the data from cryptocurrency market provider Coin Metrics, which shows that Bitcoin has already processed over $848 billion in 2018 till today, and is expected to cross $1.38 billion by the year-end.
Cater said:
“I’m conservatively estimating the London OTC market for gold, overseen by the LBMA, at 70% of global volumes. They publish clearing statistics. With these I can estimate the total net volume of regulated gold settlement at $446b for 2018 (based on 6 months of data). Conservatively, (adjusted estimates), Bitcoin has settled $848b this year, and is on track to settle $1.38T. Bitcoin, it appears, has quietly surpassed the OTC gold market in settlement volumes.”
These figures of Bitcoin volumes are just a testament to the fact that Bitcoin’s domination in the mainstream financial market is growing as a large number of people have started considering it as a potential store of value and a medium of exchange. Moreover, many analysts have argued that Bitcoin offers some better advantages over gold due to its inherent nature of liquidity, fungibility and transportability.
Last year in 2017, Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, a senior analyst at JPMorgan said that cryptocurrencies could emerge as a major asset class while competing against traditional assets like gold. He also said that regulated Bitcoin investment product like futures contracts and ETFs (exchange-traded-funds) could bring more liquidity in the crypto market.
“In all, the prospective introduction of bitcoin futures has the potential to elevate cryptocurrencies to an emerging asset class. The value of this new asset class is a function of the breadth of its acceptance as a store of wealth and as a means of payment and simply judging by other stores of wealth such as gold, cryptocurrencies have the potential to grow further from here,” Nikolaos explained.
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