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Fundamentals
Paxful Volume - Global
Global BTC trading volume continues to rise on Paxful and hit $300m USD last week.
Paxful Volume - Kenya
Paxful volume in Kenya has sharply risen in the second half of 2019 (nearly 40 BTC) a week. While this remain relatively small in proportion to global Paxful volume, it is perhaps a healthy reminder that we often ignore activity that is born out of other regions beyond the US, Europe, and Asia.
Africa is an often overlooked crypto ecosystem but is an area where crypto infrastructure is set to thrive. Some reasons as to why:
1) Sub Saharan African nations experience very high inflation. Nigeria has seen double digit inflation for three years.
2) Half of the world’s fastest-growing economies will likely be in Africa over the next five years. - Foresight Africa: 2019, Brookings Institution
3) The working age population in Africa will exceed the rest of the world combined in 2035.
Pan-African crypto ecosystem is now being built out a a rapid rate. The trend in Paxful Volume in Sub Saharan Africa is rather different to the trend see in North America in two main ways:
Trading has only really been active since mid 2017 compared to North America where trading has occurred more than a year before
Sub Saharan Africa has seen a sharp increase in volume in recent month in contrast to North America where there has been a more steady increase over 4 year and now decreasing slightly below its ceiling of $20m USD.
Localbitcoin Volume - Global
LocalBitcoin volume has decreased from the previous week and has failed to climb back above $40m USD. LocalBitcoins implemented a new KYC verification system on their platform in September which has coincided with a sharp drop in volume ever since.
Confirmed Transactions Per Day
Confirmed transactions is down slightly in the last week at ~297k transactions yesterday (down 3%). However, transactions per day is up 7% YTD.
Mean Transaction Value
The mean transaction value has decreased 16% for the week and 75% YTD.
Bitcoin Economic Throughput
Bitcoin economic throughput is a measure of financial bandwidth per unit of time on the Bitcoin network. It is simply calculated by taking the average transaction size and multiplying it by the number of transactions.
Current economic throughput is down 19% hovering around $1.73Bn USD.
Hashrate
Bitcoin hashrate (7 day moving average) is down by 7% for the week. Hashrate is up 110% YTD. Currently at 86m TH/s on the 7 day moving average.
Daily Active Addresses
The daily active addresses for Bitcoin is up 6%. Currently at 37% YTD.
Bitcoin Days Destroyed
Bitcoin Days Destroyed (BDD) is an alternative metric for transaction volume on the Bitcoin network. It is calculated by taking the number of Bitcoins in a transaction and multiplying it by the number of days it has been since those coins were last spent.
During the last week there has not been any significant BDD activity observed.
Lightning Nodes
The number of unique lightning channels on the Bitcoin network increased slightly this week (1%). The number of nodes is up still up 114% YTD.
Lightning Channel
There are 27730 unique channels on the lightning network is largely flat from the previous week (0%). The BTC capacity on the Lightning Network is also flat from previous week. Lightning capacity is up 57% YTD.
Wrapped BTC
Wrapped BTC (WBTC) is an ERC20 token backed 1:1 with Bitcoin.
The total value of Wrapped BTC has remained flat at 589 BTC.
BTC Days Since All Time High
Tweet of the Week
Our ‘Tweet of the Week’ comes from Alpine’s Greg Rocco. Rocco framed the proposition of Bitcoin against the rest of the cryptocurrency market by extrapolating the 3 arguments of Pascal’s Wager. The overall conclusion is that a rational individual would choose an option that leads to their best possible outcome. This best possible outcome would be a scenario with infinite utility - Bitcoin’s success leading to the success of other assets.
Full article link here.
About the Author
Lewis Harland is an analyst at ID Theory and is a full time researcher of decentralised networks and cryptoassets.
ID Theory Ltd. is an Investment Advisor for cryptoasset investment fund, IDT Crypto Asset Fund Ltd.
Interested in partnering with ID Theory or building something special? Get in touch through our website or at info@idtheory.io.