Seeing red? FUD that! Here’s what you should have bought instead of Bitcoin last week

November 20, 2021 Coin Telegraph

ast

Where Bitcoin leads, altcoins usually follow — but the smartest crypto traders manage to turn BTC dips into buying opportunities.

We’ve argued many times in the past that the correlation between Bitcoin’s price and the market capitalization of hundreds of altcoins makes very little sense.

Whether you buy into the idea that Bitcoin is digital gold, or a payment mechanism, or both, it doesn’t have a whole lot in common with Ethereum, Shiba Inu, or FTX’s native exchange token.

Well, whether we like it or not, big moves in the price of Bitcoin define crypto markets.

Before Bitcoin slid from the latest all-time high above $68,000 back to the region of $55,000 last week, dragging most altcoins down with it, the crypto market had seen six straight weeks of virtually uninterrupted growth.

But as soon as the market turns red, as it did last week, many traders tend to succumb to three old enemies: Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD).

Which is why we say: FUD that. Experienced crypto traders know that periods of correction can also present profit opportunities. And Cointelegraph Markets Pro’s own VORTECS™ Score found six of the ten best-performing altcoins last week, even as the market took a dive.

Unparalleled bull runs, lookalike corrections?

The VORTECS™ Score is a machine learning-powered trading algorithm that compares historic and current market conditions in digital asset markets to aid crypto traders’ decision-making.

The model takes in a host of quantitative indicators — including price movement, social sentiment, and trading activity — to arrive at a score that assesses whether the present conditions are historically bullish, neutral, or bearish for over 200 cryptocurrencies.

A VORTECS™ Score of 80 or above is considered confidently bullish for the next 12-72 hours. Assets that achieve such scores exhibit arrangements of key trading and social variables that in the past came before significant price increases.

The table below shows ten altcoins that delivered significant return on investment between Nov. 11 and 18 — the week that saw Bitcoin plunge from $68,000 to $58,000.

In bold are those tokens that hit a VORTECS™ Score of 80 or higher before reaching their peak price of the week.

Six of the best crypto trading opportunities

Six out of ten of the week’s top performing assets exhibited patterns of trading and social behavior that closely resembled historically bullish combinations before they rallied.

The Sandbox (SAND)
Crypto.com coin (CRO)
Voyager (VGX)
Koinos Network (KOIN)
TomoChain (TOMO)
AirSwap (AST)

Six out of ten is significant, given that the overall number of tokens that yielded any gains has been very modest.

What does it say about the nature of the crypto market? When things are bullish, altcoins can rally for an infinite number of reasons, oftentimes simply due to a favorable macro context and exuberance taking over the market.

But when much of the market is going south, analysis suggests that tokens supported by robust trading activity and high social sentiment are most likely to buck the trend.

These are also the times when traders need reliable data analytics to inform their strategies the most. When the floor is lava, it helps to have an extra pair of algorithmic eyes sifting through millions of data points to identify potential safe havens.

This is exactly what the VORTECS™ Score is trained to do.

Cointelegraph is a publisher of financial information, not an investment adviser. We do not provide personalized or individualized investment advice. Cryptocurrencies are volatile investments and carry significant risk including the risk of permanent and total loss. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Figures and charts are correct at the time of writing or as otherwise specified. Live-tested strategies are not recommendations. Consult your financial advisor before making financial decisions.

Crypto trading face-off: Shiba Inu (78 million percent in a year) vs Koinos (535% in a month)

November 13, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Crypto investors pick coins for many reasons. How does investing in a low market cap and real tech stack up against a massive community and questionable use-cases?

The story of Shiba Inu (SHIB), crypto’s best-performer of the year, still boggles the mind — even after multiple retellings. Just 12 months ago, the price of one SHIB token had ten zeros in front of it: $0.000000000063 on volume of $682.58, according to CoinGecko.

By late October of this year, six of those zeros had gone and Shiba Inu had flippened Dogecoin to become the largest dog-themed token in the world, a top-ten cryptocurrency worth around $47 billion.

Despite dropping almost 40% from that all-time high, SHIB still sits at a market cap of almost $29 billion — making it almost 350 times more valuable than our contender, Koinos Network (KOIN).

Koinos Network has been the best-performer of the week on the Cointelegraph Markets Pro data and intelligence platform, where the proprietary VORTECS™ Score served up a hugely bullish series of 90+ scores over the last two weeks.

Following those scores, KOIN soared from a previous high of around $0.22 to a recent high-water mark of $0.95 — still comfortably below a $100 million market cap.

What do these two projects have in common? Almost nothing… except their strong performances in the markets.

So for crypto investors who can’t decide between canine memecoins and layer-1 blockchain platforms… here’s a tongue-in-cheek analysis of their comparative strengths.

Technology

Koinos is a foundational, or layer-1, smart contract blockchain platform that aims to deliver a variety of technical innovations. Firstly, it’s designed to be modular — meaning that it should be more easily upgradeable than current blockchains, and could potentially eliminate hard forks.

It is also built to be feeless, which the team claims will help onboard many more people to blockchain-based decentralized applications. And it has universal language support, a feature that may help more developers deploy those applications without learning a new skillset. It’s currently operating in the testnet phase.

Shiba Inu has virtually no technical features that distinguish it from other memecoins, and its use-cases are essentially restricted to trading.

Winner: Koinos

Community

Shiba Inu has over 1.9 million followers on Twitter; a Reddit page with 425,000 members; and almost a million active wallets. Its followers are among the busiest in crypto and Cointelegraph can hardly publish an article on social media these days without a host of SHIB shillers leaping into the comments. The community is engaged, active... in fact downright rabid in their enthusiasm for all things Shiba Inu.

Koinos has precisely 1,500 followers on Twitter at the time of writing, and its Discord channel mainly contains arcane discussions on microservice architecture.

Winner: Shiba Inu (by a mile)

Team

Koinos is being developed by the core team that previously worked on the STEEM blockchain, and who resigned en masse when that project was ‘acquired’ by Tron founder Justin Sun.

Shiba Inu’s creator, Ryoshi (which is Japanese for ‘fisherman’) is a pseudonymous developer who insists that he, she, or they are not in charge of anything. Marketing appears to be a strong suit, however.

Winner: Koinos

Market Cap / Upside Potential

Koinos has a market cap of just over $83 million at the time of writing. Its entire supply of 99.5 million tokens is already in circulation, all of which were distributed during a ‘fair mining’ period during which anyone with a computer could mine KOIN ERC-20 tokens.

Shiba Inu famously has a total supply of a quadrillion tokens, of which almost 55 billion are in circulation. With a market cap of almost $29 billion, it is currently the world’s 11th-largest cryptocurrency.

Upside potential is hard to judge, but Koinos is seeking to join the ranks of layer-1 platforms like Ethereum, Solana, Cardano and Polkadot, four of the world’s top tokens by market cap with a joint value of almost $750 billion.

If KOIN was to attain just 1% of Ethereum’s market cap, it would need to be worth $5.55 billion — in other words, it would have to multiply 6,687x from its current price.

With no natural peers besides Dogecoin (sitting one place ahead of it at $34 billion in market capitalization) Shiba Inu's most aspirational rival might be Bitcoin, with a market cap of $1.226 trillion. SHIB is already at over 2.3% of Bitcoin’s value, which appears to limit its potential upside. Indeed it might be argued that SHIB has already peaked.

Winner: Koinos (by a mile)

Liquidity

Unrealized gains are just that. With a trading volume in excess of $1.73 billion over the last 24 hours, SHIB token trades on the world’s top exchanges — including Binance, Coinbase, OKEx, Huobi, Bitfinex and KuCoin. It’s huge. It’s immense. It’s a monster.

KOIN, however, is only available via Uniswap at the current time, where its volume over the last day is a paltry $283,000.

Winner: Shiba Inu

Fun

Shiba Inu allows holders to acquire massive stacks of tokens (millions and millions!) at low cost. Its community is enthusiastic and excitable, the memes are awesome, and as the ecosystem expands, more products and tokens (LEASH, BONE) help drive a feeling of inclusion and joy.

And let’s face it, the dog’s damn cute.

Koinos is a serious, thoughtful, deeply technical blockchain with no cute and cuddly critters in sight. As an infrastructure project, its core features are entirely devoid of Japanese hunting dogs or indeed dogs of any kind. Shame on you.

Winner: Shiba Inu

Risks

Shiba Inu has Elon Musk. When the world’s richest man tweeted that he owned no SHIB, the price dropped 20% in a day. And Vitalik Buterin was uninterested enough to donate the SHIB he was gifted (now worth $21 billion) with barely a second thought.

As a memecoin it can only be sustained as long as there’s interest. When that attention moves elsewhere, as it has done with numerous virally-driven cryptos and stocks this year, SHIB may find that it needs to add more bite to its bark.

Koinos may not deliver on the team’s ambitious goals. Or it may not find enough developers to sustain a healthy ecosystem. Or the world may simply decide that we have enough layer-1 blockchains right now, and keep plowing tens of millions into existing projects like Solana.

Like any layer-1, Koinos will need both developer interest and killer dApps to rival the big players in the space. Neither of those is a given.

Winner: None

Final Score: Tie

While Koinos screams seriousness, Shiba Inu yaps fun — and in the strangest of years for investors, both of these tokens are finding audiences with whom their value proposition resonates.

Whatever your crypto trading strategy — whether it be based on the fundamental strengths of a project’s technology or the immense power of its community — Cointelegraph Markets Pro can be a useful addition to your investing research toolbox.

Green means go: 5 spectacular altcoin rallies with one thing in common

November 6, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Aave

Serendipity is "a fortunate discovery or event when things come together just perfectly." You can't plan for it... or can you?

In crypto trading we often see entire sectors move in tandem. DeFi coins may all curve upwards together, while metaverse tokens soared on news that Facebook’s getting a Facelift.

But this week’s group of top crypto performers have very little in common... except one trading indicator that lit up in pulsating green neon letters before their prices trended upward.

We’re looking today at:

Polygon (MATIC) — a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum
Aave (imaginatively, AAVE) — a decentralized finance (DeFi) asset
Voyager (VGX) — a crypto trading platform
Koinos (KOIN) — a feeless foundational blockchain built for scalability
Linear (LINA) — a cross-chain asset protocol

All have delivered major gains over the last month, and despite their differences they have one thing in common.

Each one achieved a VORTECS™ Score in excess of 90 before reaching their peak price levels.

In fact, all these tokens exhibited patterns of trading and social behavior that were strikingly similar to conditions in the past that preceded rallies. And once these tremendously robust trading conditions were detected, most of these cryptos entered virtuous cycles wherein their price dynamics generated increased trading and tweet volumes, which, in turn, powered the next phase of a rally.

Was there a chance for traders to hop on these moon-bound shuttles early?

A sign of extreme confidence

The indicator that screamed of the extremely bullish conditions is called the VORTECS™ Score, a tool available via Cointelegraph’s subscription-based data intelligence platform, Markets Pro.

Its job is to compare the current trading and sentiment conditions to historically-similar situations, and to alert traders when bullish patterns are detected. Live testing of the VORTECS algorithm has been ongoing for over ten months.

A VORTECS™ Score above 80 is considered confidently bullish. On average, there are from 30 to 50 weekly instances of assets crossing the 80-score threshold.

Scores of 90 or above, however, are rare. In an average week, there are usually no more than 4-5 instances of such scores, and sometimes a full week can pass without a single 90.

These ultra-high scores signify the algorithm’s strong confidence that the observed conditions are similar to those that preceded an asset’s stellar price performance in the past. As previously reported, scores above 90 sometimes precede price appreciation that can last for several days.

Here is how it worked with some of the highest-VORTECS™ assets this past month.

KOIN: +100% after peak score

KOIN, an asset whose first VORTECS™ Score had been calculated on Nov. 5, was off to a formidable start right out of the gate. The asset’s score touched the 90 mark several hours after its debut at the price of 22 cents.

Within a day, it reached a high of $0.44, a 100% increase. The pump was accompanied by additional 432% of trading volume and 221% of the usual level of tweets.

VORTECS™ Score (green) vs. KOIN price, Oct. 31 – Nov. 6. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

It’s possible that the particularly striking results of the Koinos price appreciation event are partly attributable to its low market capitalization, which stood at just $20 million before the dramatic price rise.

MATIC: +35% after peak VORTECS Score

MATIC’s stellar run this month has been powered by a surge in the number of active Polygon addresses, as well as project launches on the Polygon network. The asset’s peak VORTECS™ Score of 94.2 came on Oct. 16 (red circle in the chart), when the asset was trading at $1.56.

VORTECS™ Score (green) vs. MATIC price, Oct. 5 – Nov. 5. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

Following the peak score, MATIC’s price did not skyrocket immediately, as the favorable conditions did not fully materialize until almost two weeks later. However, the maximum price increase registered after the record Score amounted to 35%, with an attendant 6.68% spike in trading volume and a 11.08% increase in tweets mentioning the asset.

AAVE: +11% after peak score

AAVE’s high-water mark came on Oct. 18 when it flashed a VORTECS™ Score of 90.8. At that moment, the DeFi token had been changing hands for $304.

VORTECS™ Score (green) vs. AAVE price, Oct. 5 – Nov. 5. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

AAVE’s ultra-high score anticipated a rally that lasted for another 11 days, culminating at the price of $338 registered on Oct. 29. The gains in trading and tweet volume were even more impressive: 488% and 118%, respectively.

LINA: +13.4% after peak score

LINA had its most bullish historical outlook registered on Oct. 11 when its VORTECS™ Score reached 90.2 against the price of $0.052.

VORTECS™ Score (green) vs. LINA price, Oct. 5 – Nov. 5. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

The next phase of its price action saw the price rise to $0.059 over a seven-day period, accompanied by a staggering 439% increase in trading volume and 200% rise in tweets.

VGX: +3.7% after peak score

Voyager Token (VGX) flashed its highest VORTECS™ Score of the month (91.9) rather late into its tremendous hike from $2.11 to $3.05.

VORTECS™ Score (green) vs. VGX price, Oct. 5 – Nov. 5. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

The asset’s price continued to hover above $3 for the next four days, powered by a 42.89% increase in trading volume and a 10.19% more intense Twitter conversation in the aftermath of the historically bullish outlook. VGX’s momentum has somewhat faded in early November, yet the robust fundamentals could point to an impending resurgence.

We may conclude from previous analysis that looking at tokens that hit the VORTECS™ Score of 80 proved to be an efficient strategy for traders seeking to identify a range of assets with a good chance of performing well within the next few days.

Focusing on those few that score beyond 90 may better serve Markets Pro members who prefer to operate on higher confidence levels and longer timeframes.

koin