Early May Update: Technicals

IOTABTC on the weekly is molding a falling wedge pattern, a bullish pattern that begins wide at the top and contracts as prices move lower. This price action forms a cone that slopes down as the reaction highs and reaction lows converge and is further confirmed with IOTA being overbought on the weekly Stochastic RSI. However, considering this is the weekly chart, there is still some time to wait before this plays out.

What we can expect in the short-term is a rebound from this bottom line of the falling wedge. However, that is heavily dependent on bitcoin – we would need to see some consolidation of bitcoin price in its newly found price zone before some of the money flows out into the altcoins like IOTA.

Trading volume is low when compared to its market cap neighbors with only $14.7 million and “Real 10” volume being $3.1 mil. What is good, though, is the volume overstatement is relatively low, there is 4.7x discrepancy between the reported and the “Real 10” volume (trading volume on the exchanges that prevent wash trading). This means that IOTA’s liquidity is moderately inflated which is not the case with the majority of other coins.

Moreover, IOTA comparatively has a solid buy support, according to coinmarketbook.cc. Buy support is measuring sum of buy orders at 10% distance from the highest bid price. This way we can eliminate fake buy walls and whale manipulation and see the real interest of the market in a certain coin. IOTA currently has meager $3.4m of buy orders measured with this method, which sets IOTA buy support/market cap ratio at 0.40% which is faintly above average value. Bitcoin and Ethereum have a 0.27% and 0.28% ratios, respectively. This novel metric indicates there are a lot of manipulations, inflated liquidity and fake orders on all crypto trading pairs, including IOTA pairs.

All social metrics marked a noticable bump due to the Jaguar Land Rover news. You can see a huge increase in news articles, Twitter and Telegram posts. Sources for the data are DataLight and Predicoin.

To assess fundamental health of a project, we used the FCAS metric. FCAS is a comparative metric whose score is derived from the interactivity between primary project lifecycle fundamentals: User Activity, Developer Behavior, and Market Maturity.

There are a few sub components which provide data to each fundamental:
User Activity is comprised of Project Utilization and Network Activity
Developer Behavior is comprised of Code Changes, Code Improvement and Community Involvement
Market Maturity is comprised of Liquidity and Market Risk. Market Maturity has less than 5% impact on a project’s overall FCAS.


FCAS ratings are on a 0-1000 point scale with a corresponding letter grade. Break points are based on standard deviations in the underlying component distributions.

900 – 1000 is marked as S for superb. 750 – 899 is marked as A for attractive. 650 – 749 is marked as B for basic. 500 – 649 is marked as C for caution. And finally, below 500 is marked as fragile. You can read more about it here.

IOTA got an average C mark with this evaluation model. C stands for caution so IOTA is not looking good under this methodology for value assessing.

Below are some of the most important news around the project in the last 30 days.

Below is our long-term forecast where we cover general market movements and sentiment shifts before delving deeper into the specific predictions for IOTA.

IOTA was started to provide distributed ledger technology for the machines and internet-of-things (IoT) space where small connected devices regularly share data.

Because these machines and devices are generally specialized to be low power and perform only specific functions IOTA does not use a traditional consensus mechanism like proof-of-work or proof-of-stake nor does it use a blockchain structure. It rather uses a different type of public ledger with a popular moniker “The Tangle”.

The goal of the project is to allow these devices to conduct micropayment transactions between themselves and potentially to securely transfer data. At the core of the project is what is referred to as the ‘Tangle,’ a directed acyclic graph (DAG) that acts as the public ledger system. The team believes that this structure will allow for feeless payments, lower compute cost, and the ability to connect to billions of devices.

The efficiency of this system also grows as the number of participants increases as transactions will be processed at a faster rate. One of the project’s more recent releases was a data marketplace that allows for storing and selling data streams while masking the source of the data.

IOTA expanded their team in 2018 with active talent acquisition, building an almost 100 man and woman army of researchers, developers, domain experts and ecosystem building enthusiasts.

IOTA’s holy grail is Coordicide – or the removal of the centralized server called coordinator that disqualifies IOTA as a decentralized ledger as long as it runs under a control of single entity (IOTA Foundation). Throughout 2018, IOTA have validated aspects of their earlier roadmap and come up with great improvements, but also started researching a potential breakthrough that if validated, would greatly accelerate the performance of Coo-less IOTA.

The IOTA Foundation officially signed an MOU with UNOPS. Through this collaboration, the IOTA Team will work with different units at UNOPS to increase transparency and efficiency, as well as safety and security for UN workers who are out on the field on a mission.

The IOTA and European Smart City Consortium +CityXChange received a green light from the EU Commission. The ENGIE Lab CRIGEN and the IOTA Foundation (IOTA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate in experimentation with the IOTA Tangle in the Energy and related IoT domains.

The list of similar memorandums and partnerships is extensive and goes beyond the scope of this article.

The IOTA Foundation established the legal framework and internal governance model for the IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund (EDF) and they also announced the formation of a Research Council.

During the last year we could see, for example, the development of the Trinity wallet and although it is still in a Beta stage, we can use it without major worries. Trinity is undoubtedly much easier to use and has more user-friendly functions.

The Foundation already has plans in place to make community engagement on development, research and adoption a lot more interactive and open in the new year, starting almost immediately.

IOTA Roadmap is very detailed and transparent and you can scrutinize their plans on this link.

What does the Icon (ICX) future look like?

In short, Coordicide will be the buzz word of the year for IOTA community and the last update we had on this project was the creation of a testnet without Coo to prove that the network can work without the Coordinator. Thus we arrived at CLIRI which is a fork of IRI (IOTA Reference Implementation) in which all trace of the Coordinator was removed. CLIRI is a test therefore it is not ready to be tested in the main network. Anyone who wants to research the CLIRI function can do so in the following GitHub repository https://github.com/iotaledger/cliri

We should consider crypto valuations like educated gambling, a ‘prediction market’ where we are betting on the odds of project and token success. There are some catalysts of success we can identify:

Real user traction is the most important driver of success, that is what most of holders call “adoption”. If people start using certain crypto project because they find it useful and it makes their life easier, that is a guarantee of success. So far, almost no crypto project can claim to have done so.

Strong financial warchest that will enable teams behind the project to develop their visions, incentivize other developers to join them and start using their product is also a crucial aspect of any project. Tied into it is treasury management – especially for the project that had big ICO proceeds. Temptation to squander all those millions into “conferences and events” (read hard-core partying on yachts and luxury hotels) was massive, especially if we consider that majority of token projects founders were no-names and ordinary employees that worked for a paycheck before the ICO fairy-tale happened to them.

Another adoption indicator – network effects, where every additional user of a good or service adds to the value of that product to others. When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases according to the number of others using it.

If you can objectively notice that your favorite token project has some of these traits happening for it, be happy – you might have found a winner.

Token success is completely dependent on tokenomics. As defined by infloat.co, tokenomics involves the incentivization of certain stakeholders to ensure particular behavior.

So, tokenomics is essentially an incentive structure designed to ensure that a token has a purpose and utility within its native network. It is the study of how coins/tokens work within the broader ecosystem that can be considered as a sovereign micro-economy. This includes such things like token distribution as well as how they can be used to incentivize positive behaviour in the network.

For example, bitcoin is designed to ensure that bitcoin miners have a reason to mine new bitcoin. Miners validate bitcoin transactions and receive (or create) newly minted bitcoin in the process.

On the other hand, individuals, businesses and other bitcoin users pay a transaction fee for miners to include their transaction in the next block. This ensures that even when all bitcoin have been minted (to the tune of 21 million, which should happen in around 2140), bitcoin miners are still incentivized to keep ‘mining’ (i.e. validating transactions).

To paraphrase all of the above in the simplest terms: if you, after weeks of research and reading, can’t figure out why the project needs to have a token, it probably doesn’t.

So why does the token exist then?

– To make the project founders rich.

But there are some people on Twitter, Reddit, Telegram claiming otherwise.

-Yes, they are either: paid to do so by those same founders, they are desperate and delusional bad holders or they are just stroking their own ego with newly learned fancy economic terms and jargon.

Needless to say – stay clear of such projects.

The downfall of altcoins that were mainstream media darlings at the start of the year, IOTA among them, can be attributed, in part, to novice investors getting scared off once the bear market kicked in with a vengeance. Every resurgence of bitcoin in recent period, was met with the, for the most part, inability of altcoins to rally with it. Reason for that can be rookie investors learning from their mistakes, while smart money that was previously watching from the sidelines has begun to enter into bitcoin.

These entities weren’t about to buy BTC when it was trading at an all-time high, but they’ll take a look now, having missed the boat the first time around. None of them, it seems, are interested in altcoins however, despite the fact that many are trading at a 5x discount. Institutional investors may be cautious, but they’re not foolish.

Some altcoins will continue to have some speculative value for the foreseeable future. But just like the now infamous tulips, the hysteria will eventually subside. We are already witnessing the first phases of that slide and even though most of the bag holders react emotionally to articles that criticize their coins, I am just observing the developments on the market. You better start emotionally detaching yourself from your “great sounding” coin because if goes nowhere, ideas are worthless without execution and real users that see value in the project.

2018 was a very interesting year overall for the broader DLT community, “ICO projects” came and burst in a similar fashion to the firework that painted the evening sky tonight.

While the mass death of barely-alive-in-the-first-place projects causes some uncertainty and skepticism among the newcomers, it is something veterans and pioneers of this space have been longing for.

In order for DLT to become established, we need quality over quantity, we need convergence on standards and consolidation of communities to bring to life what we’ve been working on for years. With less noise, 2019 will act as a Darwinian selection mechanism, much like that of which the IT companies post-dotCom Bubble experienced.

This is a good thing and absolutely necessary for the real maturation of the space.

IOTA, as the rest of the market, is tied at the hip of bitcoin’s price action. If bitcoin embarks on another bull run, IOTA can hope for one as well. Since that is very unlikely, don’t expect much to change for IOTA price-wise in this year. So 2019 will be a year of boring sideways action with minor bitcoin ignited jumps and slumps.

What does Tron future look like? See our TRX Price Prediction 2019

In general:

The main currency in cryptocurrency markets is Bitcoin and given this, altcoins tend to fuel Bitcoin runs and Bitcoin tends to do the same in return. Given this relationship, Bitcoin price movements (or lack thereof) tend to effect altcoin prices.

When Bitcoin goes up swiftly, it will likely:

In cases when Bitcoin plunges, it will likely:

When Bitcoin moves sideways, it will likely:

To summarize, Bitcoin is the focal point of the crypto market in many ways, and with BTC trading pairs on every exchange, the gravity of Bitcoin is hard to evade.

The vast majority of trading that occurs in the crypto markets are between BTC and altcoin trading pairs. Since most altcoins do not pair with fiat currencies (and only a few are paired with stable coins like USTD), Bitcoin is the next best option. Therefore, when Bitcoin is stable, it forms as the ideal base currency for buying altcoins (which is why altcoins tend to do well when Bitcoin goes sideways).

Correlation is measured on a scale from -1 to 1. Values above 0 shows the degree to which altcoin is moving in the same direction as BTC prices (either up or down in tandem), and values below 0 shows the degree to which altcoin moves in the opposite direction of BTC prices (so when BTC goes down, altcoin goes up, or vice versa). Values around 0 shows that when BTC price moves, altcoins stays steady, or alternatively that when altcoin moves up or down that the BTC price is staying steady.

Based on the correlation analysis, BTC and IOTA have a strong positive relationship. The correlation coefficient of their prices is 0.62, which was estimated based on the previous 100-days’ price dynamics of both coins. Source – coinpredictor.io

Overall, the price change of any altcoin token is explained by the dynamics of the bitcoin-influenced market. However, there are also fundamental reasons for the individual token rise and fall in price, which can be pinned down to a big tech upgrade or more often, big partnership.

The majority of projects will fail — some startups are created just to gather funds and disappear, some would not handle the competition, but most are just ideas that look good on paper, but in reality, are useless for the market. 

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum said:

“There are some good ideas, there are a lot of very bad ideas, and there are a lot of very, very bad ideas, and quite a few scams as well”

As a result, over 95% of successful ICOs and cryptocurrency projects will fail and their investors will lose money. The other 5% of projects will become the new Apple, Google or Alibaba in the cryptoindustry. Will IOTA be among those 5%?

Highly likely it will.

Future of this world is data.And data is IOTA’s main target.IOTA targets IOT(Internet of Things). IOTA has even started data marketplace alongwith the partnership of Microsoft,Fujitsu, Bosch etc. You can check it here – The IOTA Data Marketplace.

IOTA now has not only many premium companies as official partners, but also two world renowned influential experts (Dr. Richard Soley and Dr. Rolf Werner) as members of their supervisory board.

But not all is bed of roses with IOTA. Tangle and IOTA approach to DLT is absolute cutting edge and highly experimental.

The team is, at times, pretty mullish in their decisions, like the one to use a balanced Ternarywhich is a numeral system that has 3 digits,-1, 0 and 1. Iota was made to be used with existing hardware, But all existing Hardware now is completely binary. This means that all of iotas internal ternary notation has to be encapsulated in binary, This will result in increased storage and computational overhead. Iota cannot be successfully implemented into the present hardware and even if it is it will cause a significant wastage of both storage and computation power.

Iota violates cryptography’s best practices i.e Don’t Roll Your Own Cryptoand this has resulted in a lot of vulnerabilities in the system and a team led by Neha Narula found many vulnerabilities in iota’s hash function curl and the one of iota’s co-founder (Sergey Ivancheglo) claimedthat they had deliberately added the flaws in the curl hash function as a ‘Copy Protection’. All of this summed up means one thing: IOTA might live through couple of orchestrated and, for a regular trader, completely unpredictable pumps but the majority of time will be murky sideways trading with small volume and no significant interest from the market.

Check out our Verge (XVG) Price Prediction for The Future

All of this summed up means one thing: IOTA might live through couple of orchestrated and, for a regular trader, completely unpredictable pumps but the majority of time will be murky sideways trading with small volume and no significant interest from the market.

Price will heavily depend on what BTC will do and since many analysts think BTC will not be making big moves in this year, it is hard to expect IOTA will do them either. The price will probably stagnate and record slow-moving depreciation or appreciation depending on the team activity, potential technological breakthrough or high-level partnership.

With the market being completely unpredictable, forecasting the cryptocurrency price is really more of a gamble and luck rather than a data driven guesstimate.

Let’s throw a glance at the eminent publications and personalities, and their predictions regarding the IOTA price, which will give us another point of view to consider:

Walletinvestor is a popular website that does technical analysis-based price predictions of various cryptocurrencies and traditionally has a skeptical outlook for most coins. According to them, IOTA is expected to drop heavily to $0.05 per token in one year.

Trading beasts display that IOTA can climb to around $0.75 within a year which means it will essentially grow 2.5x in value in the next year.

Cryptoground predicts that IOTA might eclipse the current level by almost 3x and reach $0.85 by the end of 2019. They even added their version of IOTA price prediction 2024, where they stated that IOTA might reach $5.18 by 2024, a 20x increase to the current price.

Digitalcoinprice gave a neutral prediction saying that by 2019 end, IOTA might be worth two times more than now – around $0.5 per token.

IOTA (MIOTA) has been one of the most argued projects in cryptocurrency over the last year. However, unlike many other vaporware projects, IOTA team kept working on their network and the project seems to have a solid future, despite being disputed by most of the bitcoin maximalists. In 2020, once the market wipes out the worthless projects, IOTA might jump into spotlight and top 5 coins ranks which could see the IOTA token price go up to its all time high levels of $5.69 per coin.

If IOTA survives to see 2023, that would mean the project stood the test of time and user adoption is growing, which would all lead to the token being worth at least 10-100x than its hitherto all time high. That would mean BAT would cost $56-560 per coin.

Again, if IOTA survives to see 2025, that would mean the project stood the test of time and user adoption is growing, which would all lead to the token being worth at least 100x+ than its hitherto all time high. That would mean IOTA would cost $560+ per coin.

Predicting prices of novel, highly volatile and risky asset classes is a thankless task – best answer is no one knows. Educated guess is that realistic IOTA price for the foreseeable future is somewhere between its current price and its all time high.

The post IOTA Price Prediction for 2019 – Fundamentals Not Strong Enough To Support The Price (Early May Update) appeared first on CaptainAltcoin.

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