Crypto Markets Continue Correction

The whole crypto currency market endured another heavy correction on Thursday with Bitcoin's price dipping to well below the $10,000 mark. Although there was no indicator to this heavy drop, it seems that the expiry of Bitcoin futures at the end of the week might have triggered a sell off thus pushing the price down. This decline also affected the other major crypto currencies which saw heavy drops although in some cases they were not so marked.

Bitcoin Cash suffered a considerable 8% drop after having climbed consistently in recent days and was back at the $1,100-1,200 mark, fluctuating consistently between those two figures. At press time however, the innovative crypto currency which has far lower fees than legacy Bitcoin was trading at almost $1,200 with signs of another bull run on the cards.

Ethereum had another disappointing day when it fell perilously close to the psychologically sensitive $800 level but eventually it recovered to the $840 mark and seems to be climbing at press time as a small recovery gathers pace. The innovative crypto currency Ripple also saw a steep descent in the past 24 hours when the price dropped to well below the $0.90 mark but was recovering at press time to reach the $0.92 mark. This currency has been by far the worst performer of late with steep declines and very little rises when compared to other crypto currencies which have made considerable gains.

Litecoin was another disappointment since it sank to well below the $200 mark having reached an impressive $240 figure earlier in the week. That recovery seemed to have been based on the launch of LitePay which should be occurring on Feb 26 but the currency was dragged down by negative sentiment. After a huge bull run which saw its price rocket to around $41, Ethereum Classic also suffered a considerable pullback to around $32 - an almost 25% decline from its high reached only a few days ago. It had recovered to around $35 at press time and was seemingly on another bullish run in anticipation of the fork which is expected to take place on March 1.

Other smaller crypto currencies by market cap also suffered heavy losses with Stellar Lumens being the main sufferer dropping by almost 12% at one point. Dash also suffered a reduction in its value which saw the price drop below $600 but it recovered to around $620. Neo also saw a decline in value of around 7% but it recovered to around $115 after having dropped as low as $111 at one point.

Nano is the only coin in the top 30 by market cap to have gained significantly on a day when most cryptocurrencies have fallen by high single-digits. At the time of writing, Nano (XRB) is up almost 20 percent to the US dollar and almost 25 percent against Bitcoin.

Combined market cap of crypto currencies could easily reach $1 trillion

A major former fund manager and investor has made another bold prediction that the combined crypto currency market could easily reach the fabled $1 trillion mark by the end of the year. Matt Hougan has made a career shift from ETFs to cryptocurrencies. He jumped from the traditional fund market to a cryptocurrency index-fund manager, a market he described to Bloomberg as a "generationally significant opportunity with interesting challenges." He joins San Francisco-based Bitwise Asset Management as vice president of R&D. He made a splash with his call that cryptocurrencies are on their way to being a multi-trillion dollar market, though he also said that cryptos remain an "early-stage technology" that could be a bumpy road at times. This has been very much the scenario in the past few weeks as the markets endured a massive correction which at one point was more than 70% down from its all-time high in December when the market cap was actually in excess of $810 billion and fell to just $275 billion in early February "The pathway to $1 trillion eventually is fairly certain. How we get there is going to be volatility and uncomfortable. I think we'll get there pretty soon, though. I wouldn't be surprised if we ended the year with a cumulated market cap of over $1 trillion. But I wouldn't be surprised if there were a significant drawdown again before we got there," Hougan told Bloomberg. For instance, Hougan suggests the cryptocurrency markets could suffer a 50% drop before attaining a $1 trillion combined market cap. And as the leading digital coins have proven so far in 2018, volatility is the name of the game. "I think for investors the important thing to realize it's an extremely volatile, high-risk asset. That's why you have the high potential returns," he said. This scenario has already occurred however as indicated earlier in this article.