Cryptocurrency Market Experiencing Price Rises as Investors Come In

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Cryptocurrency is indeed having a really good time, if not the greatest time in the whole year. It surpassed JPMorgan in market value, bitcoin crossed $17,000, and as if that’s not enough, bitcoin’s rival cryptocurrencies Litecoin and Ethereum have had really great price increments over the last week. Litecoin is trading at almost $400 and Ether at about $600.
In fact, the volume of trading has been so intense that one of the top exchange services for cryptocurrencies, Coinbase, has been suffering really serious downtimes. One notice on Coinbase’s status page read “Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled” earlier this week. Moreover, Litecoin trading was also disabled for an hour and half earlier in the course of the day. On December 12, another notice read that the site was going to be shut down for an hour for maintenance. There were even notices that stated that ether and Litecoin trading was facing a major outage.

Price Hikes

Bitcoin did not really see much of an appreciation as it only came back to retain the grounds of $17,000 it had lost a week ago. Over this same period, ether has risen by 35% from $450 to $620. For those who don’t really know what ether is, it is the cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain network. Litecoin has also risen by an interestingly unexpected margin. It has shot up by about 180% over the past week, rising from $130 to $360. One must not forget though that Litecoin was actually one of the Internet’s first alternate cryptocurrencies to Bitcoin. It is widely known to have many features just like Bitcoin but has a higher confirmation rate for transactions than Bitcoin (2.5minutes per transaction to bitcoin’s 10 minutes per transaction)
CoinMarketcap, showed that almost all the cryptocurrencies were rising at almost double-digit gains. All of these price rises are a part of the much broader cryptocurrency market value surge over the past few days.

Why So Fast?

One probable explanation for this is that: due to just how popular Bitcoin has become, most investors have become rather drawn to what was known as the dangerous oceans of cryptocurrencies and seem to be enjoying the sail so far. However, this congestion on the bitcoin network has ended up pushing transaction fees from about $5 to $20. The Litecoin network on the contrary has its fee per transaction at about $0.25, which is about 1/80 of the bitcoin charge (quite outrageous). Thus it has become quite evident that people who are interested in the cryptocurrency market but aren’t happy about the current bitcoin charge and limited output are resorting to other cryptocurrency “safe houses” to invest their money.