This has been an absolutely crazy few weeks for cryptocurrency!
Lets do a quick review!
Bitcoin
Leading up to the March 10 Bitcoin ETF announcement the price of Bitcoin had made a run up to $1350
Within the 30 min after the announcement that the ETF was denied the price dropped $300 and then recovered up to $1250.
The $1250 price held fairly stable until yesterday in which we saw a large drop in price. Today BTC is trading for $986.
This recent dip is being fueled by speculation of a "hard fork"
Hard Fork - A permanent divergence in the block chain, commonly occurs when non-upgraded nodes can’t validate blocks created by upgraded nodes that follow newer consensus rules.
"Today, nearly 20 exchanges announced that, should a certain developer group take actions that would split the bitcoin block chain into two competing networks, the network running software developed by Bitcoin Core would retain the ticker symbol ‘BTC’. Bitcoin Unlimited, the alternative option, would then be advertised as ‘BTU’."
"Ostensively aimed at preventing customer confusion, the move has already been highly politicized, with some supporters of the Bitcoin Core development team heralding it as the effective end of the Unlimited project and its particular proposal for redrafting bitcoin’s rules."
Alt Coins
Ethereum
Shortly after the Bitcoin ETF was denied there were huge price surges in the Alt coins.
Ethereum reached an all time high of $47 rising from around $20 near the announcement date.
Ethereum has fallen off a bit same as BTC, now trading at $37
DASH
Dash also saw crazy price action, currently trading at $101. DASH started this year trading near $11.
The explosive price action has thrown a lot of attention DASH's way recently, it will be interesting to see if the crypto has long term staying power.
STEEM
Many STEEM holders had been incredibly frustrated watching almost all alt coins have a dramatic price rise while the price of STEEM dropped and under performed. STEEM'S had fallen out of the top 20 cryptocurrency market caps briefly and the price fell to$07. We kept wondering would STEEM ever get the boost all the other alt coins had gotten?
Well wait no more!
Today STEEM is trading at $.27 , a %141 increase!
STEEM is now listed as having the 11 largest market cap of all cryptos!
Exciting times!
(It is important to note that the whale experiment which has increased the importance of Steem Power may have affected price as well)
Sources
https://bitcoin.org/en/glossary/hard-fork
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-10/sec-rejects-bitcoin-etf-setting-digital-currency-up-for-big-drop
http://www.coindesk.com/majority-bitcoin-exchange-accord-reveals-hard-fork-dilemma/