IOTA Price Sinks 10% as Wider Market Plots Tepid Recovery
The IOTA price declined approximately 10 percent on Tuesday, even as the wider cryptocurrency market made a tepid recovery from its weekend lows.
IOTA Price Posts Worst Performance Among Top-25 Cryptocurrencies
Tuesday brought a moderate recovery to the cryptocurrency market, enabling the bitcoin price to put some breathing room between it and the crucial $6,800 support level.
The majority of other large-cap coins and tokens saw similar price movements, generally rising between one and two percent for the day. IOTA, however, was not invited to the party.
Despite entering the week within striking distance of dollar parity, IOTA proved unable to sustain its recent gains. At one point this morning, the IOTA price slipped below $0.68, though it quickly bounced back from that hiccup and has since leveled out to a present value of about $0.78.
IOTA is now down 15 percent over the past seven days, providing the token with the unwelcome distinction of having the worst weekly performance of any top-25 cryptocurrency.
A large share of IOTA trading is currently concentrated on Bitfinex, where the token’s USD pair account’s for more than 44 percent of the $125 million in global IOTA volume. Notably, the token is priced significantly lower on Bitfinex than other major exchanges. At present, the IOTA price is holding above $0.80 on Upbit, Binance, Coinone, and OKEx.
Price Manipulation or Concern over a Failed Partnership?
The reason for IOTA’s significant single-day decline is not immediately clear.
IOTA supporters, for their part, in many cases attributed the sell-off to “price manipulation” and “FUD,” arguing that the movement did not make sense since “so much is coming” that will benefit the token moving forward.
However, it’s perhaps more likely that the IOTA price is facing stronger headwinds than the wider market due to the recent revelation that Sirin Labs, creator of a crowdfunded blockchain smartphone called the “Finney” (after early bitcoin adopter Hal Finney), would not be developed in partnership with the IOTA Foundation.
The Finney whitepaper had originally stated that the phone’s operating system would be built upon the “Tangle,” IOTA’s distributed ledger. Indeed, this was true as recently as April, when Sirin Labs developers told CCN.com in an interview that they were working with IOTA as well as several other protocols.
However, Sirin Labs CEO Moshe Hogeg recently told ETHNews that the company had decided to go in a different direction.
“We’re not with iota, we looked into it and decided to go a different route,” Hogeg reportedly said, with another team member explaining that the OS will instead run on a private, Ethereum-based blockchain while Sirin Labs develops an independent “next-generation” blockchain.
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