Bitcoin Price Regains $9,000 and Loom Spikes 45% as ERC20 Tokens Help $426 Billion Market
Bitcoin has remained in the $9,100 region throughout May 2 and has not recorded any major movement on the upside and downside. A strong performance by ERC20 tokens based on the Ethereum network such as EOS, Loom, Stratis, and WanChain led cryptocurrency market valuation to increase by $13 billion. Tokens Continue to Perform WellOver the past two weeks, since mid-April, tokens have continued to record strong gains against both bitcoin and the US dollar. Over the past 24 hours, Loom, Stratis, EOS, and WanCoin have demonstrated solid gains in the 5 percent to 45 percent range, leading the cryptocurrency market to add an additional $13 billion to its valuation. At the time of reporting, the valuation of the market remains at $426 billion. Loom recorded a staggering 45 percent increase in value overnight, primarily because of the integration of LOOM by Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Loom is a blockchain platform based on Ethereum which supports the deployment of large-scale games and social media platforms in the form of decentralized applications. The Loom development team has branded the Loom blockchain network as a protocol that can handle big transaction volumes resulted from outgoing transactions of large-scale decentralized applications. Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam previously explained that in order for Ethereum to support decentralized applications to support decentralized applications with millions of active users, its scalability will need to improve by a factor of 100-fold.”These are hard computer science and game theory problems. Most of them have never been solved before. Estimating completion can be hard and can be far off. Large apps can’t run solely on chain and likely never will. They need off-chain scaling solutions. While it’s tricky to make accurate estimates when combining scaling improvements, it’s conceivable we could see a 100x improvement by the end of 2018, which would allow a 1 – 10 million user app,” wrote Ehrsam. For Loom to deliver on its mission to enable Twitter-like apps on the blockchain, it will have to demonstrate a 100-fold improvement from Ethereum in terms of scalability and flexibility. So far, apps like code-sharing site EthFiddle, Ethereum decentralized application coding platform CryptoZombies, and token-earning platform DelegateCall are based on Loom. In the short-term, it is unlikely that Loom maintains its momentum at the current level, as it experienced a massive increase in value due to the listing of Binance. Often, after a Binance listing, the price of tokens tend to fall by large margins, as seen in the case of Golem and Storm. Bitcoin TrendAfter testing the $9,800 support level last week, bitcoin has struggled to rebound beyond the $9,500 mark. If the volumes on major cryptocurrency exchanges can remain intact, it is possible for bitcoin enter the $10,000 region, especially if the dominant cryptocurrency can secure stability in the $9,500 region. The Relative Strength Index (RSI) and Williams’ Percent Range (WPR) of bitcoin currently signal a neutral zone, placing bitcoin in an ideal position to record gains in the short-term. Featured image from Shutterstock