Tag Archives: cryptocurrency

Is Bittrex a Unicorn ?

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Has Bittrex been named as a Unicorn yet ?

In the past, Bittrex had maybe 800 BTC trade per day, with Bitcoin at 600 dollars, half a million trade per day. They take 0.25% commission on all trades, maybe 1200 dollars in commissions per day, half a million in commissions per year.

Lately, with Bitcoin around 4500 dollars, they are close to 100.000 BTC trade, and 60.000 ETH trade, half a billion dollars trade per day. That means 1.25 million in commissions per day, 450 million in commissions per year. They can run the website with half a million in commission a year, so their total cost won’t be very high. I’d say it is all profit.

You could value a company using NPV,  the net present value of their yearly profits over a period of 10 years.  Their NPV would indicate a company value of around 4 billion dollars.

It would say that easily qualifies them as a ‘Unicorn’ ?

 

 

ZCash

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There is a new cryptocurrency on the market, the long awaited ZCash.

You could buy some hashing capacity over at Genesis Mining before the launch, so I bought into it. Futures on Bitmex per end december were on 1.5 BTC /Zec, roughly 1000 dollars per coin. Looking good. The first day on the exchanges was brilliant, Zec was at 3000 BTC/coin at some point, 2 million dollars per coin. But the first mining proceeds were just a fraction of a 1/1000th of a coin, so that price was just someone playing a prank. It steadily dropped back to 0.7 BTC yesterday, which was underpriced if you take the Bitmex futures serious, and now it is back up to 2 BTC per Zec.

There was a sizeable interest from investors in the coin. It is basically a Bitcoin clone with the ability for truly anonymous transactions and a short block time, faster transaction speeds. But the main difference with Bitcoin, ZCash is developed by a commercial company. These have a (rather large) stake in the succes of the coin.

There is no telling where it is going to go. As long as the market has not adopted the coin, there is no real demand or use case for it, so it remains a coin for speculators, and with mining proceeds steadily increasing the first month to 7200 coins a day, the price will probably drop steadily. I still have no idea what the production price of 1 ZEC is going to be, but let’s hope it stays around 2 BTC per Zec, then it pays for my vacation next year.

Should I add a disclaimer ? Never invest money you cannot afford to loose, it is all risky and I have a small stake in ZCash so my opinion is biased.