Mid May Update: Technicals

4H NANOBTC

After getting rejected on May 16th on the Fib 618 (May 7th high – May 13th low) at 25k sats, Nano has been ranging in a horizontal channel between 22k and 24k sats. To breakout of this trendless state and into an uptrend, NANO would need to break a sturdy resistance and previous high of May 7th at 28k.

Breakdown level for NANO is its May 13th bottom at 20k sats. Anything below it and NANO would be in a deep trouble to find its footing.

Daily NANOBTC

NANO seems to be entering a trendless ranging between two lines of Fibonacci levels – 0 at 20k and Fib236 at 23k. It formed a meek bottom in the last two days at 21.4k but there is no real bull run until NANO closes above the 236 Fib and then guns for the Fib50 at 28k.

One thing to bear in mind is the turbulent and erratic nature of bitcoin – a sudden thrust up or slide down is always on the cards which would invalidate this and all other analysis and predictions. In such cases, market is shaken up with most traders exiting altcoins and entering bitcoin positions or seeking shelter in stablecoins, especially in the initial phases of bitcoin pumps and dumps. So it is always a good idea to keep a close eye on bitcoin’s behaviour before opening a long or a short on any other coin in the market.

Should this happen, stop by again to check out our updated charts and thoughts.

Trading volumes are not looking good with reported volume being $16.2 million and “Real 10” volume being $6.7 mil. What is good, though, is the volume overstatement is low, there is only 2.5x discrepancy between the reported and the “Real 10” volume (trading volume on the exchanges that prevent wash trading). This means that NANO’s liquidity is only slightly inflated which is not the case with the majority of other coins.

Moreover, NANO comparatively has a weak buy support, according to coinmarketbook.cc. Buy support is measuring sum of buy orders at 10% distance from the highest bid price. This way we can eliminate fake buy walls and whale manipulation and see the real interest of the market in a certain coin. NANO currently has meager $559k of buy orders measured with this method, which sets NANO buy support/market cap ratio at 0.29 % which is a below average figure. Bitcoin and Ethereum have a 0.27% and 0.28% ratios, respectively. This novel metric indicates there are a lot of manipulations, inflated liquidity and fake orders on NANO trading pairs.

NANO’s market sentiment score, measured by the market analytics firm Predicoin, paints a neutral picture.

Predicoin wraps its analysis up into a single simple indicator known as the SentScore, which is formed from the combination of five different verticals: news, social media, buzz, technical analysis and fundamentals.

Nano currently has a Sentscore of 5.0 which is defined as “the neutral zone”. You can see that there was a nice spike in Twitter activity around Nano, but on the other hand both Reddit and search volume have gone down. Sentscore stayed pretty much the same over the month of April.

Overall, Predicoin’s Sentscore is an excellent indicator of community interest and can provide useful insight into which coins are trending right now.

To assess fundamental health of a project, we used the FCAS metric. FCAS is a comparative metric whose score is derived from the interactivity between primary project lifecycle fundamentals: User Activity, Developer Behavior, and Market Maturity.

There are a few sub components which provide data to each fundamental:
User Activity is comprised of Project Utilization and Network Activity
Developer Behavior is comprised of Code Changes, Code Improvement and Community Involvement
Market Maturity is comprised of Liquidity and Market Risk. Market Maturity has less than 5% impact on a project’s overall FCAS.


FCAS ratings are on a 0-1000 point scale with a corresponding letter grade. Break points are based on standard deviations in the underlying component distributions.

900 – 1000 is marked as S for superb. 750 – 899 is marked as A for attractive. 650 – 749 is marked as B for basic. 500 – 649 is marked as C for caution. And finally, below 500 is marked as fragile. You can read more about it here.

Nano has been ranked as the C category – cautious with overall 522 points as of May 10th. By far the strongest metric that contributed to this score is developer activity that got 754 points, followed by market maturity with 631 and user activity that had 425 points. This data backed fundamentals valuation model is a good insight into underlying driving forces of a project and as you can see NANO doesn’t fare well under the scrutiny of FCAS. And the primary reason for this bad score is the lack of activity and hence utility on their network.

Below are some of the most important news around the project in the last 30 days.

Below are some of the most important news around the project in the last 30 days.

Nano is delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) blockchain with directed acyclic graphs (DAG) designed to service instant, fee-less payments without offering a robust smart contract platform or reliable store of value. Nano targets a popularized market niche by working to build a protocol to with record transactions processing speeds, low latencies, and easy scalability. Nano is built to decentralize ownership of on-chain assets primarily via a captcha-solving distribution event without mining rewards or a coin offering.

In February 2018, The Nano Core team were informed by the owner of BitGrail, a fifth exchange by Nano-trading volume, Francesco “The Bomber” Firano of the loss of $170 million worth of Nano due to a software mishap. In a blog update they report that the fault appears to be related to BitGrail’s software.

This quite predictably sent a shockwave of accusations and uncertainty through the community and their coin price, which had already fallen from its January ATH, continued to slide. The epilogue of the saga is that Firano is convicted in Italian courts
and ordered to repay the $170 million worth of cryptocurrency that went “missing” early last year. And this was the event that marked the whole year for NANO or XRB as it was called at the time.

Other notable events saw Ledger Nano S announcing support of Nano tokens on their hardware wallet, couple of community developed projects being launched on Nano network (NanoMate, NanoVault etc).

What is Nano coin?

As you would expect, Nano team that is known for their technical prowess, was very active in developing and optimizing their network with couple of bigger releases seeing the daylight, like Boulton, Dolphin V18 and official Nano wallets for mobile and desktop.

Nano’s roadmap is much more interactive than many other crypto projects, letting those interested in the project explore the nuances of their plans.

To review it in-depth, click here.

There are no clear set deadlines for their goals but considering their track record, there is little doubt they will deliver on the plans, at least the technology part. But will it be enough for Nano to survive and thrive without a massive business side push? Time will tell.

The downfall of altcoins that were mainstream media darlings at the start of the year, NANO among them, can be attributed, in part, to novice investors getting scared off once the bear market kicked in with a vengeance. Every resurgence of bitcoin in recent period, was met with the, for the most part, inability of altcoins to rally with it. Reason for that can be rookie investors learning from their mistakes, while smart money that was previously watching from the sidelines has begun to enter into bitcoin.

These entities weren’t about to buy BTC when it was trading at an all-time high, but they’ll take a look now, having missed the boat the first time around. None of them, it seems, are interested in altcoins however, despite the fact that many are trading at a 5x discount. Institutional investors may be cautious, but they’re not foolish.

What does the ICX future look like?

Some altcoins will continue to have some speculative value for the foreseeable future. But just like the now infamous tulips, the hysteria will eventually subside. We are already witnessing the first phases of that slide and even though most of the bag holders react emotionally to articles that criticize their coins, I am just observing the developments on the market. You better start emotionally detaching yourself from your “great sounding” coin because if goes nowhere, ideas are worthless without execution and real users that see value in the project.

We should consider crypto valuations like educated gambling, a ‘prediction market’ where we are betting on the odds of project and token success. There are some catalysts of success we can identify:

Real user traction is the most important driver of success, that is what most of holders call “adoption”. If people start using certain crypto project because they find it useful and it makes their life easier, that is a guarantee of success. So far, almost no crypto project can claim to have done so.

Strong financial warchest that will enable teams behind the project to develop their visions, incentivize other developers to join them and start using their product is also a crucial aspect of any project. Tied into it is treasury management – especially for the project that had big ICO proceeds. Temptation to squander all those millions into “conferences and events” (read hard-core partying on yachts and luxury hotels) was massive, especially if we consider that majority of token projects founders were no-names and ordinary employees that worked for a paycheck before the ICO fairy-tale happened to them.

Another adoption indicator – network effects, where every additional user of a good or service adds to the value of that product to others. When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases according to the number of others using it.

If you can objectively notice that your favorite token project has some of these traits happening for it, be happy – you might have found a winner.

Token success is completely dependent on tokenomics. As defined by infloat.co, tokenomics involves the incentivization of certain stakeholders to ensure particular behavior.

So, tokenomics is essentially an incentive structure designed to ensure that a token has a purpose and utility within its native network. It is the study of how coins/tokens work within the broader ecosystem that can be considered as a sovereign micro-economy. This includes such things like token distribution as well as how they can be used to incentivize positive behaviour in the network.

For example, bitcoin is designed to ensure that bitcoin miners have a reason to mine new bitcoin. Miners validate bitcoin transactions and receive (or create) newly minted bitcoin in the process.

On the other hand, individuals, businesses and other bitcoin users pay a transaction fee for miners to include their transaction in the next block. This ensures that even when all bitcoin have been minted (to the tune of 21 million, which should happen in around 2140), bitcoin miners are still incentivized to keep ‘mining’ (i.e. validating transactions).

To paraphrase all of the above in the simplest terms: if you, after weeks of research and reading, can’t figure out why the project needs to have a token, it probably doesn’t.

So why does the token exist then?

– To make the project founders rich.

But there are some people on Twitter, Reddit, Telegram claiming otherwise.

-Yes, they are either: paid to do so by those same founders, they are desperate and delusional bad holders or they are just stroking their own ego with newly learned fancy economic terms and jargon.

Needless to say – stay clear of such projects.

NANO, as the rest of the market, is tied at the hip of bitcoin’s price action. If bitcoin embarks on another bull run, NANO can hope for one as well. Since that is very unlikely, don’t expect much to change for NANO price-wise in this year. So 2019 will be a year of boring sideways action with minor bitcoin ignited jumps and slumps.

In general:

The main currency in cryptocurrency markets is Bitcoin and given this, altcoins tend to fuel Bitcoin runs and Bitcoin tends to do the same in return. Given this relationship, Bitcoin price movements (or lack thereof) tend to effect altcoin prices.

When Bitcoin goes up swiftly, it will likely:

In cases when Bitcoin plunges, it will likely:

When Bitcoin moves sideways, it will likely:

Correlation is measured on a scale from -1 to 1. Values above 0 shows the degree to which altcoin is moving in the same direction as BTC prices (either up or down in tandem), and values below 0 shows the degree to which altcoin moves in the opposite direction of BTC prices (so when BTC goes down, altcoin goes up, or vice versa). Values around 0 shows that when BTC price moves, altcoins stays steady, or alternatively that when altcoin moves up or down that the BTC price is staying steady.

NEO has had a correlation coefficient of 0.90+ for the most of its market life, as shown on the image below – source.

To summarize, Bitcoin is the focal point of the crypto market in many ways, and with BTC trading pairs on every exchange, the gravity of Bitcoin is hard to evade.

The majority of projects will fail — some startups are created just to gather funds and disappear, some would not handle the competition, but most are just ideas that look good on paper, but in reality, are useless for the market. 

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum said:

“There are some good ideas, there are a lot of very bad ideas, and there are a lot of very, very bad ideas, and quite a few scams as well”

As a result, over 95% of successful ICOs and cryptocurrency projects will fail and their investors will lose money. The other 5% of projects will become the new Apple, Google or Alibaba in the cryptoindustry. Will NANO be among those 5%?

That is a tough question to answer.
From technology perspective, NANO does look very solid and unique in their solving of archetypal blockchain problems like scalability and decentralization. However, Nano is very weak in terms of business growth, they have almost no merchant market penetration and noone outside of crypto circles knows about them, ergo – their brand presence is very weak, almost non-existent.

Considering Nano is competing with other payment coins, which is an arena full of heavyweights, starting from the king itself – bitcoin and followed by a whole bevy of projects like bitcoin cash, litecoin, dash, monero etc. its chances of success are meager.

Nano is also infamous for their poor marketing efforts, or to be more precise complete lack of such. Nano team apparently took an approach “build it and they will come”, fully relying on the technology and neglecting all other business aspects of a project of this magnitude.

They did step up their promotion game a bit, especially on Reddit where you can see Nano posts on r/cryptocurrency fairly often but that still doesn’t reach the users outside of the crypto bubble and considering crypto community’s toxicity towards overpromotion, Nano might see counterproductive results from its efforts.

All of this gives Nano pretty slim chances of actually succeeding, unless their mantra of “build it and they will come” actually surprises everyone and they land some big corporation to implement them as a payment rail. Probability for this to happen, though, is levitating around zero.

So what can give rise to NANO, have the price go up and lift the mood among the holders? Right now, the main engine of NANO’s machine is their allegedly superior technology. I say allegedly because due to the low activity and usage of NANO network, it has never been tested in real-life circumstances, both from the implementation and security perspective.

NANO has also been lauded for their active community that often takes part in the development of the NANO ecosystem with their own apps, services and platforms.

Everything hinges on adoption, especially for a payment coin like NANO. Nano is already in one of the two toughest sectors of cryptocurrency with trucks of other projects competing for the same users and same market. If we judge by the hitherto success on the business side, NANO has low probability of competing with the crypto bellwether bitcoin.

Reaching $100 would mean a 65x growth from the current levels – not impossible, but highly improbable. To put things in perspective, that would mean NANO has a market cap of $13 billion whereas bitcoin stands at $335k per coin (if we assume BTC/NANO ratio stays the same).

What goes in NANO’s favor is its relatively low total supply of 133 million that is already 100% issued, meaning there is no inflation.

No, judging by the team activity on social media, github, their own website. Their communities on Reddit and Telegram are also active, although much lower engagement levels are noticeable when compared to 2017. Coin is also still listed on all major exchanges which indicates that NANO is far from a dead project.

Is Dogecoin a joke that is not funny anymore? How does Doge future in 2019 and beyond look like?

All of this summed up means one thing: NANO might live through couple of orchestrated and, for a regular trader, completely unpredictable pumps but the majority of time will be murky sideways trading with small volume and no significant interest from the market.

Price will heavily depend on what BTC will do and since many analysts think BTC will not be making big moves in this year, it is hard to expect NANO will do them either. The price will probably stagnate and record slow-moving depreciation or appreciation depending on the team activity, potential technological breakthrough or high-level partnership

With the market being completely unpredictable, forecasting the cryptocurrency price is really more of a gamble and luck rather than a data driven guesstimate.

Let’s throw a glance at the eminent publications and personalities, and their predictions regarding the Nano price, which will give us another point of view to consider:

Walletinvestor is a popular website that does technical analysis-based price predictions of various cryptocurrencies. According to them, Nano is expected to go down to $0.08 in one year. This price prediction is very skeptical and probably inaccurate as the current price is a whole order of magnitude greater and NANO would need to totally implode to drop that heavily.

TradingBeasts algorithm is traditionally much more optimistic in its forecasts and it sees Nano reaching $3.53 by December 2019 which means it will do a solid 4.5x jump from its current price.

Cryptoground predicts that Nano might reach $3.10 by the end of 2019. They even added their version of Nano price prediction 2024, where they stated that Nano might reach $27 by 2024.

Digitalcoinprice gave a slightly positive prediction saying that by 2019 end, Nano might be just a shred more valuable than now – $1.10 per coin.

The post Nano (NANO) Price Analysis Prediction 2019 – NANO Holders Still Waiting For Their “Moon” Day (May 22nd update) appeared first on CaptainAltcoin.

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