Bloomberg adds Ripple, Ethereum, Litecoin to terminal as alt currencies soar

15 Dec 2017

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With the bitcoin boom firmly under way, other digital currencies are catching the interest of financial professionals and mainstream investors. In evidence of this, Bloomberg has added prices for three other crypto-currencies - Ripple, Ethereum and Litecoin - to its terminal service, which is used by major banks and investment houses worldwide.

The addition amounts to a validation of sorts for the digital currencies, which have been around for a while but have always played second fiddle to bitcoin:

On Wednesday, the crypto markets achieved another historic milestone as the total market cap crossed the $500-billion mark. However, the driver was not bitcoin, whose relative price gains have been modest this week. The gain came from an altcoin rally led by Ethereum and Ripple prices on Wednesday, and Litecoin prices surging in the past week.

The altcoin market cap crossed the $200 billion mark for the first time and cryptocurrencies volumes approached record highs above $35 billion.

While the three digital currencies rely on similar distributed ledger technology as bitcoin, they are quite different from one another.

Ethereum relies on a more versatile type of software that has made it a popular platform for many other digital tokens, while Litecoin is built as a quicker, more efficient clone of bitcoin. Ripple, meanwhile, is actually a private company that provides blockchain technology to banks, and allows some of its currency (known as XRP) to trade in the open market).

Ethereum saw a remarkable price jump early in the year when it suddenly soared from under $10 to around $200 in a few months, and is now trading near $700. Litecoin saw a similar but more recent price jump, while Ripple has experienced a series of surges in the last year, Forbes reports.

The interest in these currencies has become so intense that exchanges are having a hard time selling them due to massive volumes. On Tuesday morning, the most popular crypto exchange in the US, Coinbase, was forced to shut down trading for over an hour during heightened price action because the website could not handle the traffic.

Ethereum, the second largest digital currency by market value, has broken through the $600 and $700 barriers in the past two days for the first time, and posted an impressive advance for the third consecutive day on Thursday, surging as high as $786 and later settling at a high of $744.50, according to GDAX. This is already a price gain of almost 12 per cent going into the trading session on Thursday morning while posting gains of 30 per cent and 25 per cent for the past two trading sessions, respectively. Its price has risen more than 5,000 per cent since the start of the year, according to CoinDesk.

The interest in these other so-called ''alt-currencies'' likely represents speculators looking for alternatives given how expensive bitcoin has become, according to Fortune magazine (it's currently trading around $16,500).

Bloomberg declined to comment on the decision to add the new alt-currencies to the terminal, but a person familiar with the company said told Fortune were added as a feature for foreign-exchange traders.

The person added that the terminal data is drawn from prices provided by Bitstamp. The Luxembourg-based exchange is one of several platforms for obtaining digital currency in a market where price spreads can differ significantly from exchange to exchange.

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