Top Ten Aspiring Crypto Coins For April
This article will take a look at ten cryptocurrencies that have interesting developments lined up for the month of April, which could also have a positive effect on their price.
Ethereum (ETH)
Current Price: $1716
Market Cap: $214 Billion
Market Cap Rank #2
Ethereum is a decentralized open-source blockchain that employs its native currency, Ether (ETH).
More importantly, ETH is a platform for several other cryptocurrencies. It enables the execution of smart contracts and the construction of decentralized applications (dApps).
Besides smart contracts and dApps, Ethereum’s blockchain can also use its ERC-20 compatibility standard to host other cryptocurrencies. These are called tokens, and so far, more than 280,000 such tokens have been launched, including LINK & BNB.
A hard fork for Ethereum is scheduled for April 14. The fork is named ”Berlin” and will occur at block 12,244,000.
While it was initially scheduled for mid-2020, it was pushed back due to some centralization concerns.
Berlin will include numerous optimizations, more specifically for gas prices, potential DDOS attacks, and an update on how the Ethereum Virtual Machine reads code.
As for its price movement, ETH has been increasing since re-testing its previous all-time high on Feb. 28.
IOTA (IOTA)
Current Price: $1.43
Market Cap: $3.96 Billion
Market Cap Rank: #28
IOTA is a distributed ledger that enables the secure exchange of both data and value without fees.
The native token is IOTA, which has the ultimate goal of allowing humans and devices to exchange services and data.
The most extensive update in the network’s history will launch in April. It is named ”Chrysalis” and will improve wallets, software implementations, libraries, and protocols. Also, it will create a foundation for future features such as tokenization and smart contracts.
The starting date for the ”Chrysalis” upgrade is set on April 21st, while the transition date on April 28th.
As for its price movement, IOTA has fallen below the $1.52 level after purportedly breaking out above it.
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Skale (SKL)
Current Price : $0.61
Market Cap: $405 Million
Market Cap Rank: #130
SKALE network is an open-source platform, which aims to scale dApps for usage in the real world. The SKALE innovator program has more than 100 dApps in development.
It is a project from the Network Of Decentralized Economics Foundation. The foundation supports the network by electing representatives and validators to run SKALE chains and nodes.
The native token is SKL, which has use cases in staking, payments, and governance of the network.
Despite being a small market cap coin, SKL is the 9th highest crypto asset when measured by its staking value. This means that there are only eight projects that have more staked value than SKL.
The new staking epoch will begin on April 1st and could further increase the staking value of SKL.
As for its price movement, SKL has been decreasing since reaching an all-time high price of $1.244 on March 13. However, it has just bounced on its 0.618 Fib retracement support level at $0.51.
Elrond (EGLD)
Current Price: $146
Market Cap: $2.51 Billion
Market Cap Rank: #44
Elrond is a protocol that aims to offer exceptionally fast transaction speeds through its sharding mechanism, which is known as adaptive state sharding. The mechanism combines the advantages of three distinct sharding types to improve the communication between them.
The native token is known as EGLD. It has three main purposes: Staking, paying fees in the network, and rewarding validators.
On April 9, Elrond’s DeFi 2.0 module will be released. It will offer six new components:
Elrond NFT standard
Launchpad
Swap
Lending
Synthetics
Bridges
Every one of these components will aim to improve important issues, mostly in the banking sector. Also, each of them is going to be built by an independent team.
As for its price movement, EGLD has just broken out from a descending resistance line.
Swipe (SXP)
Current Price: $3.26
Market Cap: $285 Million
Market Cap Rank: #156
Swipe is a platform that wants to connect the cryptocurrency and fiat worlds. It offers three main products. It offers three main products:
The Swipe Wallet – which enables users to store assets.
The Swipe debit card – which provides users with a simple way to spend their cryptocurrencies.
The native token – SXP, which is used for transactions and fuels the Swipe Network
Version two for the Swipe Wallet will launch on April 2021. Among others, it will improve layer two scaling solutions and allow for DEX trading.
The wallet is already available on the Apple app store.
As for its price movement, SXP is potentially trading inside a parallel ascending channel, after beginning to drop on March 20.
Qtum (QTUM)
Current Price: $8.44
Market Cap: $829 Million
Market Cap Rank: #93
QTUM is a public, Proof-of-stake blockchain platform that enables smart contract coding, deployment, and execution. It is also a platform for decentralized applications (dApps) due to its protocol, which allows for the modification of its settings.
A hard fork will occur on April 30, just before block 845,000. It will provide numerous updates, such as:
The reduction of block time to 32 seconds
Improve Graphic user interface (GUI) responsiveness
Provide a new Staker that is highly efficient.
Fix bugs related to wallets, GUI call contracts, and text box links.
As for its price movement, the QTUM increase has stalled since March 26. However, it is still trading above the previous resistance at $7.65.
Coti (COTI)
Current Price : $0.45
Market Cap: $300 Million
Market Cap Rank: #150
COTI is a platform that allows companies to effortlessly build and be the sole owners of their payment solutions.
It provides numerous elements that are crucial for an effective payment infrastructure, including but not limited to scalability, simplicity, security, buyer-seller protections, etc.
In April, COTI will launch the 3.0 staking update. In it, each community Node will have its capacity increased from 7 Million to 8 Million COTI. This will allow new participants to enter the network and will provide upgrades to existing stakers.
In addition, a new staking campaign will be hosted on KuCoin.
As for its price movement, COTI seems to be trading inside a very large symmetrical triangle pattern.
COTI Triangle
Centaur (CNTR)
Current Price: $0.019
Market Cap: $16 Million
Market Cap Rank: #815
CENTAUR is an ecosystem that aims to connect the current financial system with the economy of decentralized finance. With its interconnection protocol, it aims to solve the problem of interoperation between different blockchains.
There are several important events coming up for Centaur in the upcoming weeks.
On March 31, the Centaur Wallet will be launched. It is a DeFi compatible wallet, which places special emphasis on user experience and interface.
On April 14, Centaur LP will be released. It is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) that uses single-side staking to provide liquidity.
Finally, Centaur Chain, the official Centaur mainnet, will be launched on April 28.
As for its price movement, CNTR seems to have been following an ascending support line since Jan. 16.
Enjin Coin (ENJ)
Current Price: $2.46
Market Cap: $2 Billion
Market Cap Rank: #50
Enjin Coin (ENJ) is a cryptocurrency that is designed for the gaming industry. More specifically, it deals with gaming products and their tokenization.
Another use for ENJ is to create and back the value of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).
On April 6th, ENJ will release JumpNet, a bridge network that will allow for faster on-chain transactions.
As for its price movement, ENJ has broken out from a descending resistance line and validated it as support afterward.
Stater (STR)
Current Price: $1.67
Market Cap: N/A
Market Cap Rank: N/A
Stater is an open-source lending platform for NFTs. It allows users to leverage their assets while still maintaining ownership over their assets.
On April 16th, the Lydian Update is expected to launch. This will allow the Stater product to move into the Mainnet. This comes as the next step after a three-month development work that has been done in Rinkeby.
Stater is also launching partnerships with numerous other projects, such as Polygon (MATIC).
As for its price movement, STR reached an all-time high on March 28.
For last months aspiring coins, click here.
Stage set for landmark US crypto listing
Coinbase Global Inc, the largest US cryptocurrency exchange, has received approval from regulators to list its shares on the Nasdaq, paving the way for a landmark victory for cryptocurrency advocates.
The decision from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is another boost to the legitimacy of digital currencies, which are rapidly gaining acceptance from the mainstream financial services industry.
Earlier this week, Visa said it would allow the use of the cryptocurrency USD Coin to settle transactions on its payment network.
PayPal has also started allowing US consumers to use their cryptocurrency holdings to pay its millions of global online merchants.
A successful listing for Coinbase would mark a significant endorsement for a sector that has struggled to win the trust of mainstream investors, regulators and the general public.
Coinbase said in a blogpost its shares were declared effective by the SEC earlier on Thursday.
The company, which plans to go public through a direct listing, expects its shares to start trading on the Nasdaq on April 14.
In a direct listing, no shares are sold in advance, as is the case with an initial public offering.
The company’s share price is determined by orders coming into the stock exchange.
Advocates argue it is a better way to price new stock rather than an IPO.
In a regulatory filing last month, Coinbase said its stock in the private market traded at a weighted average price of $US343.58 in the first quarter of 2021 through March 15, a nearly 13-fold jump in its valuation to $US68 billion ($A90 billion) in just a few months.
The surge in Coinbase’s private market valuation illustrates how the perceived value of the company has rallied hand-in-hand with the jump in the price of cryptocurrency bitcoin.
S. Korea’s Crypto Rules Might Only Help the ‘Big 4’ Exchanges
As U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the Central Bank of Nigeria and India’s Parliament have demonstrated, governments and regulators around the world are wary about the rise of cryptocurrency. South Korean authorities are no exception. Lee Ju-yeol, the governor of the Bank of Korea, said before a parliamentary committee last month that bitcoin “has no intrinsic value” and that he “doesn’t understand why the value is so high.”
While the Korean government doesn’t seem bent on banning crypto, it is certainly intent on regulating it. The effect may be monopolization by South Korea’s largest exchanges at the expense of smaller competitors.
One critical piece of legislation is called the “Act on Reporting and Using Specified Financial Transaction Information,” aka the Financial Transaction Reports Act (FTRA), which requires virtual asset service providers to register with financial authorities and comply with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations. The FTRA was amended to restrict crypto trading in March of last year, but it only went into effect on March 25, 2021. It’s critical because it causes all sorts of bureaucratic and administrative complications for crypto exchanges that wish to enter the market or simply survive.
Related: The MIT Bitcoin Expo: A Free Educational Event for Anyone Who Wants to Gain Some Crypto Tech Chops
Starting March 25, all cryptocurrency exchanges are required to register with the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of the Financial Services Commission (FSC). The FIU will then file the registration with the FSC, which must approve the registration before it becomes official. So while the government is packaging it as a “registration process,” the FSC is actually becoming the unofficial state licensor of the Korean crypto industry.
Until the FTRA was amended by the National Assembly, South Korea had no specific legal language to define or describe crypto trading. Cryptocurrency wasn’t (and still isn’t) officially recognized as a financial asset, so there was no way to regulate it as such. Pretty much anyone who wanted to could set up an exchange and was not required to register with any authorities.
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The FTRA is South Korea’s nod to the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF). It’s basically Seoul’s way of telling the world, “We comply with the FATF’s AML guidelines.” Legislators now define cryptocurrencies as “virtual assets” and crypto exchanges as “virtual asset service providers.” A VASP has been defined as any business that facilitates sales, purchases, exchanges and transfers of crypto that involve fiat. This includes exchanges, custodies and brokers. Interestingly enough, peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms and crypto consultants (people who just provide information) do not qualify as VASPs, mostly because they don’t deal directly with fiat.
That’s the keyword: fiat. So long as a Korean’s bitcoin or ether or dogecoin is never converted to Korean won, the government doesn’t seem to care about it. Until we see the day when people actually use crypto as an everyday form of payment to the point that it rivals or supplants cash, the government probably won’t try to tax crypto in its native form.
Related: The MIT Bitcoin Expo: A Free Educational Event for Anyone Who Wants to Gain Some Crypto Tech Chops
Officially, the government’s concerns about crypto are rooted in money laundering or “protecting” consumers.
But perhaps what’s really grabbed the authorities’ attention is the explosive increase in crypto trading volume over the past few years. The nation’s crypto trade is dominated by four major exchanges: Bithumb, Upbit, Korbit and Coinone. (I’ll now refer to these as the Big 4.) In just January and February of this year, the Big 4 saw 445 trillion won (US$391.7 billion) in trading volume. For some context, their cumulative trading volume for the entire year of 2019 was 488 trillion won ($394.3 billion). The Big 4’s daily trading volume for these two months averaged at 8 trillion won ($7 billion), nearly a fourfold increase from the same period in 2017.
More complicated than it seems
Some of you may be thinking: OK, exchanges have to register with authorities. So what? Just register and if you’re legit you’ll get approved. As long as you’re not doing anything shady you shouldn’t have anything to worry about, right?
In theory, yes. In practice, most likely not.
There are certain conditions an exchange must meet in order to have its registration “approved” by the FSC. By far the most important of these conditions is the need to form partnerships with local commercial banks.
Before the FTRA amendment, users on crypto platforms could register under various user names and deposit cash into a company bank account to purchase intra-platform credits that could be used to purchase crypto. These company accounts are referred to as “hive accounts” because a single account houses multiple users. While a thorough investigation would eventually reveal who deposited how much from which account, a hive account makes it much more difficult to keep track of who’s who.
The FTRA update, however, requires users to register under their real names and link their personal bank accounts. In other words, goodbye hive accounts. This necessitates partnerships with commercial banks, meaning the new legislation gives banks the ultimate authority to determine which exchanges survive. Some crypto purists won’t be happy about this because it essentially negates one of the foundational principles behind crypto: freedom from traditional financial institutions.
But in South Korea, banks have the authority to determine whether or not a VASP meets AML standards. Every bank has its own criteria, which are not made public, but there are two universal conditions: VASPs must differentiate between native assets and customer deposits, and they must have their information security management systems (ISMS) certified by the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA). ISMS certification has proven to be time-consuming and costly. It usually entails a hefty consulting bill and expensive hardware. While this may not be a problem for the Big 4, it could be a barrier to smaller and mid-sized exchanges and startups.
But here’s the kicker: The Big 4 already have partnerships with commercial banks, which have been reluctant to partner with smaller exchanges. Banks are naturally conservative and averse to risk, so they tend to prefer major players over the little guys.
So if an exchange wants to become legit, it needs a bank partnership. Because banks have the ultimate say in who gets those partnerships, they have the ultimate say in which exchanges survive.
“Crypto startups that aren’t on a major corporate scale will have a hard time getting their ISMS certified, acquiring bank partnerships and meeting other conditions for VASP registration,” said Ku Tae-eon, an attorney with the strategic consulting firm Tek & Law, at a conference co-hosted by CoinDesk Korea in November. Ku argued that the revised FTRA will shrink the nation’s crypto industry. He has called for separate legislation specific to crypto.
But even the Big 4 seem on edge. Bithumb, the biggest of the four, recently began delisting dark coins in what looks like a campaign to seem more “legitimate.” Trading for three dark coins (cryptocurrencies that offer greater anonymity) on Bithumb ceased on March 24, a day before VASP registration began. Coincidence? Probably not.
The registration deadline is Sept. 24. Any VASP that fails to register or has its registration denied will be shut down. Sure, it could continue operating as a P2P platform, but the majority of Korean traders will likely flock to the Big 4 for the same reason most people look to Google for searches even if there are other options: it’s just more convenient. Plus, the average Korean investor (especially newcomers) will most likely want to use fiat for their crypto purchases.
Naturally, industry insiders are predicting the Big 4 (out of an estimated 200) will ultimately be the only crypto exchanges with fiat on-ramps. CoinDesk Korea’s Park Geun-mo and Kim Dong-hwan cautiously predict that maybe one or two could be added to the list at most. “Until September rolls around there’s no way to tell what will actually happen, but it doesn’t look good for the smaller exchanges,” Park told me.
Once their hive accounts are stripped away, smaller exchanges will struggle to survive because it’s virtually impossible for them to secure partnerships with banks. Banks will probably deem their AML systems unfit. As banks ultimately bear responsibility if any funds are used for money laundering or terrorism financing, there’s no reason for them to risk partnering with a smaller exchange.
Survival of the coziest
The bottom line is that after Sept. 24, it’s going to become that much harder for an outsider to build up the specs to compete against the Big 4 or even qualify as a registered VASP. Furthermore, any up-and-coming cryptocurrency that seeks to have a significant impact on the Korean market will have to get listed on the Big 4. There have been reports of Busan Bank holding talks with five other exchanges about potential partnerships, but things are still up in the air. A source at Busan Bank has made it clear to CoinDesk Korea that “considering partnerships and making them actually happen are totally separate things.”
While Busan Bank is a regional bank and isn’t as big as national names like Shinhan or Woori, it’s still a commercial bank that would help legitimize an up-and-coming exchange.
On March 16, the FSC issued a “warning” to crypto traders to “check the registration status” of exchanges and to “determine whether an exchange will be sustainable in the long term” before creating an account and using the platform. This is being read as a de facto declaration that a significant number of exchanges will be shut down. It may as well read: “Don’t bother trading crypto unless it’s on the Big 4.”
As if a signal of things to come, OKEx Korea recently announced it will shut operations next month, citing unsatisfactory profits and the difficulty of forming a bank partnership.
Funny enough, Korea’s crypto ecosystem could end up mirroring South Korea’s overall economy, where a small number of conglomerates comprise a majority of economic productivity. According to the Korea CXO Institute, 64 chaebols (family-owned conglomerates) comprised 84% of the country’s GDP but only 10% of jobs in 2019.
Of course, there’s a silver lining. The average investor will certainly benefit from crypto becoming institutionalized and going mainstream. Services on the Big 4 will probably get much more convenient and more accessible as time goes on. But much as how I can basically choose between LG or Samsung when buying a refrigerator, average Korean retail investors will most likely be trading their crypto on the Big 4.
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