UPDATED 21:16 EDT / JANUARY 17 2018

EMERGING TECH

Cryptocurrencies recover as buyers flood market looking for bargains

In what could be described as an epic rollercoaster ride for investors, cryptocurrency prices bottomed out in trading Wednesday and started to recover, led by a solid increase in bitcoin as buyers flooded the market looking for bargains.

After hitting a low of $9,200.12 at midday EST, bitcoin rose 27 percent, to $11,374.90, as of 8:55 p.m., while Ethereum shot up 34 percent from a low of $780.92 to $1,044.01 also at 8:55 p.m. Ripple XRP, which had seen some of the biggest losses in the crypto wipeout, also saw some of the biggest gains as the market recovered, up 49 percent from a low of 90 cents to $1.39.

Besides bargain hunting, there was seemingly no other reason for the price bounce, as nearly all media outlets were still covering the price plunge from yesterday versus the price recovery Wednesday afternoon. There was no new news during the day in terms of crackdowns on cryptocurrency trading in China or South Korea, both of which are credited in sparking the crypto wipeout.

Noting that the selloff may have simply been a cyclical correction, Joe Van Hecke, managing partner at Chicago-based Grace Hall Trading LLC, told the South China Morning Post that “we get selloffs like this fairly regularly. I think this one is more pronounced and press-worthy since it is affecting more people and the dollars at stake are greater.”

Now, he said, “it’s a great time to evaluate which of these coins have staying power, actually have utility going forward, and invest in those.”

Not everyone was negative about the future. Kay Van-Petersen, an analyst at Saxo Bank, predicted that bitcoin will reach between $50,000 and $100,000 in 2018 thanks to the influence of bitcoin futures. “First off, you could argue we have had a proper correction in bitcoin, it has had a 50 percent pullback at one point, which is healthy. But we have still not seen the full effect of the futures contracts,” Van-Petersen told CNBC.

Van-Petersen went on to claim that other cryptocurrencies could outperform bitcoin in 2018, in particular Ethereum.

“Ethereum came after bitcoin, it has a more unified leadership than bitcoin,” Van-Petersen added. “They seem to be a bit further along the way in regards to forming the solution to scaling issues. And you can see transactions on their side eclipses transactions across other cryptos.”

Image: Pixabay

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