Bitcoin Watchers Are Blaming the Slump on the Moon

January 17, 2018, 7:57 AM PST

If regulatory concerns aren’t enough to explain Bitcoin’s 50 percent slump from its record high reached last month, how about blaming it on the moon?

The Lunar New Year, which marks the first day of the year in the Chinese calendar, is being cited by some as contributing to Bitcoin’s slump as Asian traders cash out their cryptocurrencies to travel and buy gifts for the holiday that starts Feb. 16 this year. The festivity is celebrated not just in China, but in other Asian countries including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Korea and Thailand.

"The January drop is a recurring theme in cryptocurrencies as people celebrating the Chinese New Year, aka Lunar New Year, exchange their crypto for fiat currency," said Alexander Wallin, chief executive officer of trading social network SprinkleBit in New York. "The timing is about four to six weeks before the lunar year, when most people make their travel arrangements and start buying presents."

Bitcoin had a similar decline at the beginning of 2017, when it slumped from a high of $1,162 to a low of $752 in January, similar to what happened in the first month of the prior year. In 2017, the total cryptocurrency market peaked on Jan. 5 at $22 billion, only to bottom out a week later at about $14 billion, Joe DiPasquale, who manages cryptocurrency fund of funds BitBull Capital, wrote in a report. The rebound back to the previous peak concluded in mid-February of 2017.

While Chinese yuan and Korean won used to account for most Bitcoin trading volume, regulatory crackdowns in those nations have reduced their significance -- and trading in U.S. dollars and Japanese yen now account for well over half of the volume. But that’s little comfort to Bitcoin investors who have seen prices tumble this year after the cryptocurrency surged 1,400 percent last year.

Ethereum Startup Vanishes After Seemingly Making $11, Leaves Message: ‘Penis’

Jan 29 2018

An Ethereum startup called Prodeum disappeared from the web on Sunday after raising a grand total of $11 USD from investors in a crowdsale. Shortly after the website disappeared, a message appeared on its homepage: “penis.”



Prodeum’s website now redirects visitors to the Twitter account of a cryptocurrency trader (they did not immediately respond to our request for comment), and its Twitter account has been deactivated.

Prodeum is at least the second Ethereum startup to pull up stakes after raising money from people in events called Initial Coin Offerings, or ICOs, in which a startup funds their enterprise by taking cryptocurrency from people in exchange for digital tokens. Some ICOs have managed to raise millions of dollars, and the last startup to vanish after conducting an ICO—Confido, which disappeared from the internet in late 2017—made off with roughly $374,000. (A message later appeared on Confido’s site stating that it would buy back investors’ tokens, but it’s unclear if that took place.)

Prodeum, by comparison, only seems to have raised $11 based on the Ethereum address that was advertised on Prodeum’s site as being the ICO address. (Update: After this article was published the contents of the ICO wallet were sent to another wallet. That wallet contains roughly $100, with the other funds all coming from a single wallet that predates the Prodeum ICO and contains 46 cents.)

Prodeum’s pitch, according to a cached version of its webpage, was to track vegetables in a supply chain using digital addresses on a blockchain—a decentralized ledger at the heart of Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

The Prodeum website, for what it’s worth, is flashy and overall very well done. To throw off the suspicious, if you click a photo of any of Prodeum’s staff, you’re taken to that person’s associated LinkedIn profile. It also appears, as Buzzfeed journalist Ryan Mac noted on Twitter, that the startup was paying people on Fiverr to promote the ICO by writing “Prodeum” on their bodies. Still, it doesn’t seem like all the promotion was enough to make Prodeum’s crowdsale profitable.