Three Altcoins - Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple Added to Bloomberg Terminals
2017 has proved to be a fantastic year for the crypto-community, especially the second-half which has played a crucial role in deciding the market momentum. Bitcoin, the darling cryptocurrency of investors, has managed to grab the attest of several institutional investors and financial professionals with its stupendous run this year. Although late in the show, altcoins have contributed quite significantly to the crypto markets taking it to a record valuation above $550 billion.
Three major altcoins, namely Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple are calling the shots since past seven days as there has been a massive influx of investors buying them taking it to record high valuations. The result is that Bloomberg has recently decided to add the price of these three alto coins on their terminals services. The Bloomberg Terminal is used by several banking institutions, professionals, investors and traders to follow financial markets and the addition of these three altcoins is a positive sign for the crypto markets.
Lily Katz, a Bloomberg reported, confirmed on Thursday by tweeting:
Although, all these cryptocurrencies run on the similar distributed ledger technology, each of them has a different blockchain network.
Bitcoin has been the dominant player in the crypto league and also the favorite pick of investors this week. However, recently, with a sudden surge and massive influx of investors buying Bitcoins, there have reportedly been issues of network clogging that has resulted in slow transaction speeds and higher transactions costs. Bitcoin is currently trading around $18,000 and has surged by over 1800% in past one year.
Ethereum, Bitcoin’s arch rival and the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, has surged by more than 9000% in one year. Ethereum started 2017 with a price of $8 and is currently trading at $694 with its all-time high of $751.37. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum blockchain features a more flexible and versatile software protocol that allows other decentralized applications to be built on the top of it. For this reason, Ethereum blockchain is the preferred platform for many startups to launch the ICOs.
Litecoin is another altcoin that has emerged as the dark horse recently. This week the value of cryptocurrency surged over 200% and since the start of 2017, Litecoin has surged by more than 7000%. Litecoin which started the year with a mere price of $4 is currently trading at $300 with a market cap of over $16 billion. Many analysts call Litecoin as “Bitcoin hedge” and believe that it offers more stability over Bitcoin and has a better advantage to tackle scalability issues in comparison to Bitcoin.
Ripple is also a distributed ledger technology and is working in tandem with banks to replace the SWIFT banking system for international transactions. Ripple’s blockchain technology solution has a better advantage over the existing system in terms of faster transactions speeds and reduced transaction costs. Currently, Ripple offered a vis-a-vis comparison to other cryptocurrencies and how does it offer a better advantage for speed, cost and scalability in comparison to other cryptos.
The addition of these altcoins to Bloomberg terminals marks a positive progress in the direction of getting digital currencies into the mainstream. Bloomberg has however refused to comment on this move but a person familiar with the matter this feature was added specifically for foreign exchange traders. The person also said that the terminal data will be drawn from the prices provided by Bitstamp.