Market Analysis: What happened this week?

It all seemed to start with the dip of Bitcoin, with many people point due to the fact Ethereum liquidated 2500 Bitcoins, to raise funds for their project. Everyone was used to dumps like this, and thought Bitcoin would rebound. But nope, slowly volume increased and price decreased, and subsequently Litecoin and Darkcoin fell.

But just the liquidation of 2,500 Bitcoins all at once couldn’t have done this. For example, look at this flash crash on one Bitcoin exchange that happened yesterday, hitting to a low of $309.

Bitcoin wasn’t hit as hard as the other two mentioned coins, with Bitcoin only briefly hitting $327 on BTC-E, an isolated incident on one exchange rebounding quickly soon after that. Across the board, the lowest Bitcoin has hit is around $450, or a 25% decrease from a fair market price of only $600 from a little over 3 weeks ago.

Litecoin has dropped to a low of $3.60, over a 50% drop from a fair market price of around $7 before the downtrend.

While most cryptocurrencies have taken a hit due to the network effect, arguably Darkcoin had taken the hardest hit, with a low of $1.50, being the lowest it has been for quite some time. Also, Darkcoin has dropped market cap significantly, dropping from number 3 to number 5, to all the way down to number 9.

While most people are shocked by the price, some people are acquiring massive amounts of BTC, especially in this bear market. People used to the Bitcoin game are used to this kind of volatility, some day traders even welcoming it after the period of stability we had in the $550 – $600 range.

With the bear market slowly correcting itself, prices are beginning to return to normal. Litecoin is again approaching $5, and Darkcoin has doubled quite rapidly in price, around $1.50 at its low doubling to $3 overnight.

While that may seem like not that much, the sudden growth of Darkcoin wasn’t just the market correcting itself. Darkcoin developers around the same time announced plans for RC5, Darktor, and other anonymous features to complement their focus on privacy and anonymous transactions.

Like what we saw with Reddcoin, hype usually incites a price increase, and then a major correction after the market has overextended, typically after the feature is released (for example, POSv released on August 2^nd).

All in all, this week was certainly a good opportunity for anyone to get some cheap coins, namely Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Darkcoin. While you won’t be getting the absolute best price you could have gotten, it’s still not too late to make a sizable margin just from buying now and waiting for coins to return to their normal market prices.

Photo 1: BitcoinWisdom

Photo 2: BraveNewCoin