Following the statements of chinese president Xi JinPing on blockchain, bitcoin and the whole crypto market recorded astronomic gains, recovering all losses of the last 2 months.
However, one particular group of crypto projects outpaced bitcoin itself – namely, chinese based projects.
The slew of big gainers is lead by NEO and Ontology, two of the probably most known projects from China, along with Tron and Bittorrent.
NEO is up 38% in the last 24 hours, followed by 28% jump from Ontology. VeChain and Elastos are also in 20%+ gains, while Tron and Bittorrent recorded slightly lower gains of around 15%.
We picked up the noise around NEO thanks to Sanbase – a crypto swiss-knife research tools, that among many other things, measures murmur among professional traders in innumerable Telegram, Discord chats.
It has been very quiet around NEO in the last year, after the coin was one of the best performers in the crazy days of 2017. However, with this most recent positive development, NEO got a huge confidence boost since the project is known for its focus on regulatory compliance and collaboration with authorities.
There are also announcements of possible new cryptography and blockchain laws in China, which could further solidify NEO’s long-term prospects as the regulatory uncertainty is seen as one of the biggest perils for all crypto projects, NEO included.
Ontology is designed to provide a layer of privacy on top of a public NEO ledger. It was launched in late 2017 by Onchain, a Shanghai-based R&D company founded by Da Hongfei and Erick Zhang, the creators of the NEO project.
Despite significant team overlap, Ontology and NEO remain independent of one another. They do cooperate closely though as back in July, they announced a partnership to build an open cross-chain platform and establish the foundation for the next-gen Internet. As a new era of blockchain adoption approaches, the partnership will facilitate the industry’s accelerated growth by leveraging both parties’ strengths to introduce an efficient and inclusive interoperability protocol. Based on both parties’ leading positions, this partnership marks an industry-wide milestone.
The price of Bitcoin skyrocketed overnight, rising by nearly 40 percent from a recent low.
The sharp turn came as Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke highly of the decentralized technology on which the digital currency is founded, telling members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee that the country should “seize the opportunity” of blockchain.RELATED STORIES
“We must take the blockchain as an important breakthrough for independent innovation of core technologies,” Xi said. “[We must] clarify the main direction, increase investment, focus on a number of key core technologies, and accelerate the development of blockchain technology and industrial innovation.”
China banned cryptocurrency exchanges in 2017, and Xi’s comments are believed to be among his first to embrace blockchain technology so thoroughly.
The price of Bitcoin cracked $10,000 briefly Friday night, a symbolic but notable threshold the digital currency has not reached in over a month, at which point it had been enduring a steep sell-off.
Xi’s speech may have suggested to investors that a potentially expansive consumer base for cryptocurrency could begin to open, although other reporting has suggested that Bitcoin could instead face China as a competitor, rather than an open market.
