Something is happening in cryptoland! But what exactly?
Personal reflections...
It has always been a volatile and crazy market overall, but for the last 1-2 weeks, it has just exploded:
So I asked myself: Who could the new investors be?
Is it because more and more real people are entering the market(s)/projects and distributing their investments? Is it maybe institutional investors (pension funds, investment funds, banks)? A specific region or country?
One, some or all of these entering the market leads to an increase in the evaluation of the projects/currencies invested into...so far, so good.
So if it was one of these groups, one would expect, especially bitcoin and ethereum to benefit...which they do (both at all time high regions).
But if it was mainly institutional investors, one would expect a due diligence and therefore they probably would stick to these two (although in my personal due diligence, bitcoin would not look good aside (mass-)psychological/emotional reasons/motives) - but actually almost all projects/currencies have taken off...
So it seems arguable, that the new investors seem not to be institutional as they could not be able/willing to diversify their investments so wide and into currencies/projects so opaque, even the most sophisticated experts in the field cannot comprehend if it is a copycat, scam or a grand vision...right? Then again, CFDs were not transparent as well...
Of course there are the "oldies" in the sphere - those having invested in digital currencies for a long time and some of them viewing any blockchain project as a currency at first (or for ever)...these seem to be really diversifying, maybe as the bitcoin scaling debate (Bitcoin Core VS Bitcoin Unlimited) seems to also get on their nerves...but probably mostly because they want more of the "invest-early-profit-extremely"-scheme working even better for them...
So - this group could explain the dive into anything not bitcoin and Ethereum putting some of their profits into rather smaller and new projects/currencies.
And then - one could stop pondering and look at data - but to find data in a sphere that loves anonymity and uses private/public keys like others use facebook/whatsapp - is really hard.
But why not look at one thing, that is tracked well, thanks to the markets: The trading pairs being used.
And there something lurked, that I did not expect to see so clearly - the KRW, the (South) Korean Won.
For bitcoin, looking at the trading pairs in late 2016 it was mainly people buying/selling BTC (bitcoin) with CNY (Chinese Yuan, although called Renminbi in China), after the Chinese Central Bank understood the effects on "currency control" and undermined selling BTC for USD in China, the strongest trading pair for BTC was with USD (January17). Unfortunately I never did screen shots, but I do not remember seeing the KRW there in the upper region - until now.
Actually there was a story a month or so ago, that Ethereum's star was rising in South Korea. And that ETH (Ethereum) to KRW trading pairs made up 10-17% of all ETH volume...
Funny enough - ETC (Ethereum Classic) which has a very similar name and could get mixed up has also risen in South Korea...
So for now, to me, it seems, there are a lot of new private investors from Korea in the markets...maybe even institutional players in South Korea (as some insurances there like Kyobo Life at least are doing a lot of PR about blockchain projects).
And the "oldies" are diversifying like never before - something I (obviously) have not data to show for, but is a result of so many Slacks and Telegram groups I read for some time...