In what has been something of a winter to forget so far for Bitcoin, its younger sibling, Ripple, has continued its network expansion by adding Malaysia’s CIMB Group to an already impressive repertoire.
Image Source: Investing.com
CIMB Group is Southeast Asia’s fifth-largest bank and represents something of a scalp for the burgeoning technology. The move will enable RippleNet’s customer base to establish over one hundred global financial institutions that CIMB will be able to partner with - facilitating global payments.
The effect that Ripple in the market has had was underlined by the company’s Chief Strategist, Cory Johnson, who claimed at Techonomy 2018 that Ripple was “probably the most advanced company in all of blockchain.” TransferWise was recently forced to comment on speculation that they would soon be embracing the payment solution.
The hype building around this blockchain global network comes at a time of relatively poor exchange rates around the company’s competitors. Given that Bitcoin holds a 48% share of the crypto market, this poses some problems for investors.
Although the total crypto market cap had decreased from around $790 billion to $120 billion in the last 12 months, Bitcoin is still dominating the market:
Image Source: Stips
There’re over 2,500 different cryptocurrencies on the market, primarily dominated by Bitcoin, Ripple and Ethereum with a combined market cap of almost $80 billion.
Image Source: Investing.com
Better tools for analysis
This summer, cryptoanalysis website, Coinnounce, bemoaned the lack of investment in technologies that can help currency exchanges provide accurate data for their users. “According to some of the business analyst the current technology that the cryptocurrency exchanges are incorporating with reference to the amount of trading volume they handle doesn’t match,” Coinnounce explained.
Coinnounce concluded that “the better the technology in cryptocurrency exchanges uses, the lesser it is susceptible to the fraudulent activities and market manipulations.”
The sad truth about crypto in 2018 is that many people are interested in investing in cryptocurrencies like Ripple, but are put off by a highly-speculative market and a lack of tools to enable long-term fundamental analysis.
This is a known problem in the crypto world, and there are many companies looking at providing better insights that promise to give investors better insights into the many digital currencies out there beyond the behemoth of Bitcoin.
On CNET, CEO of STIPS, Dmitrii Kotegov, explains, “Due to the challenge of finding a sound investment, the need for the crypto-currency market for traditional financial tools that provide benchmarks during trading and enable systematized operations is emerging”.
Through this framework funds accumulating investors’ money can use these tools as a guide for purchasing most liquid tokens. While investors will be able to compare ROI with the market-average cryptocurrency dynamics in order to evaluate efficiency and expediency when choosing a fund. Traders too can exploit the index to see the real-time market picture and make informed decisions.
In a market that’s brimful of uncertainty, one thing we can count on is that when accurate real-time market data enters cryptocurrency exchanges, the confidence boost it will bring for casual investors will provide a sizeable boost for all stakeholders.
The need for decentralisation
Better cryptocurrency management will come from fully decentralised platforms. Considering that the term ‘decentralisation’ has become something of a buzzword in the industries of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, it’s evidently lacking in the crypto exchange stakes.
Not only does decentralisation help to eliminate any bias towards a particular currency in the industry, but it can also play a huge role in ensuring the safety of investors’ assets.
If a platform is owned and operated by a single authority, then the chances are that it’s maintained in the same location. This makes it an easy target for hackers and fraudsters.
Such hardships befell crypto exchange, Mt.Gox, where almost 650,000 Bitcoins were stolen by hackers in 2011 - the largest cryptocurrency theft of all time.
In the last 30 days, more than $85 billion of all cryptocurrency trading volume came from just from top five exchanges.
Image Source: CoinMarketCap
If some of these exchanges (or all in the worst case scenario) where hacked, it would endanger the entire industry.
Logically, the future of cryptocurrency exchanges is one that will be fully decentralised, protecting users from lapses in security and the subjective information and analytics that are prone to misleading audiences
when arriving from a single source. It’s only through decentralisation that an ecosystem can be built that exponentially develop while minimising the garbling typical for centralised data aggregators.
It’s also through these superior levels of supported analytical insight that the likes of Ripple and other cryptocurrency systems with big ambitions can naturally rise into the mainstream and gain the coverage that their repertoire fully deserves.