By Welcome to the first edition of the BitcoinPrice.com quarterly cryptocurrency recap! This is a chance for us to look back on the last three months of action in the crypto space — analyzing charts, reviewing this quarter’s biggest headlines, and looking into new projects.
Cryptocurrency Market Review for Q2, 2018
This quarter’s Bitcoin price action. See more charts at BitcoinPrice.com.
We started the quarter off with Bitcoin hovering around the $8000 mark. At that time, the total market cap across all cryptocurrencies was sitting at $320 billion, down more than 50% from the New Year’s $830 billion.
Throughout April, the market slowly inched up to a peak cap of over $470 billion. Bitcoin hadn’t seen the $10,000 mark since November 2017, and it came extremely close to breaking through that ceiling in early May.
Since then, the cryptocurrency charts have followed a relatively stable downtrend, temporarily breaching the $6000 Bitcoin support line for the first time since late 2017. This was in mid-June, and since then prices have been up and down,with Bitcoin yet again falling below $6000 in the last days of the quarter.
The market has propped itself up 10% throughout these first few weeks of quarter three, and there stand a wide range of predictions for where Bitcoin will finish the year — from economists saying $0 to BitMEX’s Arthur Hayes saying $50,000.
Top Cryptocurrency Headlines for Q2, 2018
What better way to look back on the last quarter than by seeing the top cryptocurrency news headlines?
NASDAQ open to becoming cryptocurrency exchange
- CEO Adena Friedman says “Nasdaq would [certainly] consider becoming a crypto exchange”
- Nasdaq is already in collaboration with cryptocurrency exchanges; among others Gemini
U.S. Congress supports blockchain technology
- March 2018 US Joint Economic Committee Report “officially endorses” both blockchain technology and cryptocurrency
- Congress says “it is important [not to] prejudge or hinder technological developments.”
Wired calls Bitcoin an abstraction and loses $120k
- 5 years ago Wired magazine called Bitcoin an “abstraction” and destroyed their wallet keys
- The wallet contained 13 Bitcoins — worth over $260,000 at peak price and around $85,000 today
Facebook talks of its own cryptocurrency
- Facebook announces intentions to develop blockchain technology (although unclear what)
- The social media giant is called a hypocrite for its recent ban on cryptocurrency-related advertisements
Steve Wozniak says Ethereum could be the new Apple
- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says Ethereum could be as influential as Apple has been
- Steve also announces that he has dumped Facebook stocks
Hot Cryptocurrency Projects in Q2, 2018
2018 has certainly seen the death of some cryptocurrencies, but others have been born to take their place — here are five of the hottest, up-and-coming cryptocurrency projects we saw this quarter.
Claiming to be the “future of website monetization and distributed storage”, Oyster offers website owners a stream of revenue by harnessing their visitors’ computing power. Not only that, as it also provides a pioneering solution to decentralized file storage.
Oyster (with the appropriately-named “PRL” token) is trading on BitForex and Kucoin, among a number of other exchanges, and has followed the market’s general price downtrend this quarter.
2. Ontology
If you take a peek at their website, you’ll see the Ontology project stressing that it’s a high-performance blockchain. This can mean a lot of things, but their advertised functionality includes digitizing identities, authenticating web services, and distributing data exchange.
Ontology (ONT) is trading on all the major exchanges, including both Binance and Huobi, and spiked up at the start of this quarter before slowly ebbing away with the rest of the market.
3. Request Network
Let’s be honest, actually spending cryptocurrency isn’t as easy as it should be; however, the Request Network is keen to change that with a simple, Ethereum-based blockchain solution that allows anyone, anywhere to request a payment from another user.
The Request Network token (REQ) is also trading on all the major exchanges, and has seen a relatively quiet 3 months.
4. ICON
ICON wants to bring blockchain technology to all the everyday industries — financial, medical, and educational, among others. They offer independent blockchains all linked up to the mainnet which can be used to quickly share data across the network.
ICON’s ticker is ICX, and it’s trading on Binance as well as a handful of Asian exchanges. Like the other cryptocurrencies on this list, it hasn’t been able to overcome the overall bear market.
5. Stratis
Stratis is helping C# developers build their own blockchain applications. It’s targeted at enterprise clients who want their own, lightweight blockchain solutions, and has a proven track record in product tracking, data recording, and identity management.
The token is STRAT — trading on Binance, Bittrex, Poloniex, and more. While falling a considerable amount against the dollar over the last 3 months, it’s managed to hold its own as a BTC trading pair.
See you next quarter!
We hope you enjoyed this BitcoinPrice.com quarterly recap of the cryptocurrency market and that you’re already looking forward to 2018’s third quarter recap. In the meantime, for live price charts, daily news, and how-to articles, be sure to visit our website.