Bithumb Lists Waltonchain (WTC), IoT Chain (ITC), Fuels Strong Price Rise

Bithumb, one of the most active South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges, said on Friday it is listing Waltonchain (WTC) and IoT Chain (ITC), sparking a nearly 30% jump in WTC prices and an almost 50% spike in ITC prices amid strong trading volumes.

Bithumb is also offering a 1% payback bonus for depositing the two assets until Sunday midnight (UTC+9). There will also be a trading reward until September 6, to encourage trading activity in WTC and ITC.

https://twitter.com/BithumbOfficial/status/1035379771004215296

Waltonchain is a blockchain project aiming to build an Ethereum-like ecosystem. After the news, the WTC digital asset, which ranks in the top 50 by market cap, appreciated hit a peak of $5.55, rising from a low of $4.10 on Thursday.

WTC has been drifting a bit higher over the past two weeks, but is still some 90% lower compared to its peak price of nearly $46 reached at the end of January. Moreover, there were hopes for three-digit dollar prices for WTC, similar to Ethereum (ETH), which never materialized. The price slide since January has been in line with the bearish market sentiment, and, at one point was triggered by a scandal related to a reward going to one of the Waltonchain employees.

The other newly added blockchain project, IoT Chain, ranked no. 197 by market cap, aims at producing a high-security light operating system for the Internet of Things (IoT). This week, ICT prices jumped significantly, doubling since last Friday, with accusations of insider trading ahead of the listing news surfacing across social media. Bithumb’s announcement took ICT up from $0.23 on Thursday to as high as $0.49 as of 7:49 UTC Friday, before a slowdown to $0.38 as of 12:13 UTC.

WTC is an asset based on a blockchain in China, and on one side, this may be an advantage as the country adopts new technologies and supports local blockchain projects. On the other hand, China is cracking down on the crypto dialogue, targeting scams distributed through social media channels. Relatively high-quality projects like Waltonchain may suffer along with the crackdown on scam ICOs.

With the addition of Bithumb, WTC trading will have immense support from the Asian markets. Currently, about two thirds of WTC volumes are concentrated on Binance, but WTC also has a presence on Huobi and OKEx. More than 73% of the volumes are in the WTC/BTC pair, giving the asset a strong correlation to BTC positions. The influence of Tether (USDT) is low, with WTC/USDT pairs making up 7.5% of total volumes, based on data from Cryptocompare.

Waltonchain launched its mainnet at the start of August. But the project has invited criticism for not launching a wallet, and in effect still rewarding nodes with ERC-20 tokens.

https://twitter.com/neas83/status/1033410745541767169

The team has in effect delayed the launch of a native token until September 20, while for now WTC still exists as an Ethereum-based token, and the new balances will require a new snapshot. This has raised extreme criticism from the community, underlining the incomplete mainnet launch.

Neither the author nor the publication assumes any responsibility or liability for any investments, profits, or losses made as a result of this information. Cryptocurrency trading and investing are risky propositions, and market participants are advised to always conduct thorough research.