Waves, one of the elder statesmen of the cryptocurrency world, has been on an absolute tear the past month, rising 85% and reversing six months’ worth of downtrend. This has prompted renewed talk of the much anticipated, and some consider mythical, decoupling from Bitcoin.
Is Waves on the verge of leading a revolution, or will the Bitcoin tractor beam suck it back in again?
What is Decoupling?
Bitcoin has, since the dawn of cryptocurrency, led the way in the market. Its price action has always had a huge impact on the thousands of other coins, largely irrelevant of their own catalysts and qualities. In a bull market, alts tend to go down when Bitcoin goes up, and when Bitcoin goes down, alts follow. In a bear market, as we’ve seen, alts tend to mirror Bitcoin more, being ground down along with it, and enjoying the odd relief pump alongside it. We don’t often see alts breaking away from Bitcoin unless there’s a major catalyst, and even then the price inevitably returns to the overall pattern of the market, dictated by Bitcoin. A proper, full on decoupling would see a coin break away from Bitcoin’s price action and rise on the back of its own merits, retaining its price in line with strong fundamentals.
The reason why this hasn’t happened yet is because the majority of projects within the crypto space are simply nice ideas with a blockchain attached. This means no finished product, as such there is no real world use and no reason for price to increase independently. When alts really took off at the very start of 2018 it was due to the fact that Bitcoin’s price explosion had been exhausted and all the money poured into them. So, we can’t say that this was because of any inherent value in the proposition of alt coins and what they were offering.
Will Waves Prove to be the Pioneer?
Waves’ rapid price increase can be attributed in part to the addition of trading pairs being added to the popular Huobi exchange, but this in itself would not be enough to start a decoupling. A raft of improvements have recently been added to the Waves trading platform, including an upgrading of the mobile app. Since then Waves CEO Sasha Ivanov has been teasing the community with huge news, posting cryptic messages on social media and ratcheting up the hype machine in a manner reminiscent of Tron head Justin Sun.
Much depends on this announcement, expected Tuesday, as to whether a long-term break from Bitcoin’s price can finally be anticipated for an alt coin. Huge news could lead to Waves maintaining its astronomical rise and fuelling further talk on the subject, while underwhelming news will likely end in a price reversal, potentially putting to bed considerations of a decoupling for the time being. Alt coin holders everywhere will be firmly hoping for the former.
