Yuan Keeps Falling, Bitcoin Stable, Eth Rises
Despite unprecedented intervention by Chinese authorities last Thursday by, according to speculation, ordering its banks to limit liquidity of CNY in offshore markets, sending the borrowing rate for shorting higher than 100%, causing the biggest one-day move in years and crashing bitcoin’s rally, the market appears to be unimpressed.
As expected, Yuan’s value kept falling today, deprecating by 0.25% against the dollar, with the currency seemingly continuing to eye the significant psychological threshold of 7 CNY.
Interestingly, bitcoin has failed to respond, indicating the mood has somewhat dampened following China’s direct intervention in the bitcoin space by ordering Chinese based exchanges to refrain from any “offline promotions,” and not engage in any “fake trading,” as well as to enact “mandatory strong KYC,” and to not mention devaluation.
Nonetheless, after bitcoin’s incredible rise to surpass gold parity and the crash that followed, price remains relatively stable at around $900, suggesting a cooling off period while the market gains better information on the value of the currency.
On the other hand, Ethereum is suddenly rising, coinciding with China’s direct intervention in bitcoin. The barely two years old digital currency began a mini run on the 7th of January, further seemingly responding to today’s Yuan continued fall in value.
Ethereum is trading at a slightly higher price in China by about $0.10, leading some to speculate that the Chinese and their government continues the whack-a-mole game with capital controls loops opened and closed as central authorities try and steer the market.
But, there are news specific to Ethereum which may explain the recent moves. What can be called the most advanced blockchain platform as it extends the technology’s capabilities to that of smart contracts turning digital money into fully programmable money is working towards a more mature environment by providing to household names and other companies enterprise ethereum.
The Ethereum Chessboard
The digital currency has two main competitors, Hyperledger and R3, with bitcoin being a category of its own as it does not have smart contracts, thus considered by most ethers as complementary due to having a different focus.
It may be too early to say, but Eth’s public blockchain, which incentivizes the exploitation of any bugs by providing handsome bounties to the smartest people across the globe, thus through trial and error reaching a stage of bullet proof security, combined with the fact that Eth is actually ready to go, may have given the platform an edge over the other two.
That is because last year ethereum seemingly became the platform of choice for private blockchains with most based on a forked and adopted version of the public blockchain rather than on Hyperledger, which has seemingly reached out to Ethereum, or Corda.
If that is indeed the case, all talent and resources can be focused on one platform with many mutations as required for specific needs rather than a dispersion of resources towards different base protocols. Capitalizing on this, enterprise ethereum may consolidate its position, focusing attention and driving the entire space, whether public or private, forward.
Whether it can indeed do so remains to be seen, just as it is unclear whether the news of enterprise ethereum are sufficient to explain the recent rise or whether, instead, eth too is now responding to global markets. What seems clear, however, is that 2017 is stacking up to be the most interesting and exciting year so far for the blockchain space in particular and the wider world more generally.
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