Since Bitcoin (BTC) began to level off in price after its futures contracts launched mid-December, altcoins have become the top trend. Many investors have been on the hunt to discover the next cryptocurrency to make gains above 1000% and compete amongst the top 10 digital tokens.
Last week, Tron (TRX) and Stellar (XLM) made significant strides amongst all the altcoins but have fallen short.
TRON
Source: coinmarketcap.com
The biggest disappointment had come from TRX, as its founder Justin Sun has been promoting the coin heavily on his Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) but the price isn’t reflecting the tweets. Yesterday he tweeted that the South Korean Exchanges being removed from CoinMarketCap has directly affected the price of TRX as it is displayed on the index and the Korean community is an absolutely vital to Tron. Across the board, there were sell-offs across the cryptocurrency community as individuals were unaware of the index’s move, which caused a sharp fall to move digital currencies.
Additionally, On Sunday the founder had been hit with plagiarism accusations that seemed to have dropped investors trust further in the project. Today, Sun announced a partnership with a senior developer from Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) on his twitter, as well as another vague “serious partnership” this time with space innovative company. The founder needs to announce his many undercover partnerships soon, or his new TRX investors might just drop the digital token all together and leave Tron where it was a month ago, selling at $0.005 a coin.
At press time, the coin is trading at $0.112, down -2.28% in 24 hours time but is still up 2140% for the month.
STELLAR
Source: coinmarketcap.com
Stellar made considerable gains in the first week of the new year, as many investors have felt that they’ve missed getting in on Ripple (XRP) before it skyrocketed. Stellar and Ripple were founded by Jed McCaleb, and are popular among banking institutions.
Just recently, IMB (NYSE:IBM) started using Stellar’s network to develop a cross-border payment system with 5 of the largest banks around the world. Stellar’s transactions setlle between 2 to 5 seconds, allowing its users to exchange government-backed currencies much quicker than the current system.
Due to the price dip early in the week, It seems that a majority of investors in Stellar might have come from South Korea. Its price seems to mimic what Ripple does, as both projects aim to do basically the exact same thing but McCaleb, has now switched his focus primarily to Stellar. Within the last half of 2017, many banks around the world began studying ways that blockchain technology could ultimately save them time and money, and it’s inevitable that blockchain will make its way into the current banking system in the near future. Both Ripple and Stellar are the leading contenders to change the banking industry but which one will reign supreme?
At press-time, Stellar is selling at $0.56 a coin, up 1.67% in 24 hours.