Since it's all time high on Sept. 14th, Ark has seen it's marketcap slashed by almost 40%. The price, once above $4, now sits at around $2.30.
I attribute this downward trend to a few things:
- Overall loss of marketcap in the whole market due to China news and natural pullbacks after hitting all time highs on September 1st.
- The Oxycoin ICO debacle - TL/DR, investors were able to fund the Oxycoin ICO with Ark - Oxycoin then sold their Ark before the ICO was completed, driving down the price.
- The biggest exchange Ark is on is Bittrex - which sees as much as 99% of Ark's volume. Price manipulation (as seen above) is much easier when the majority of coins on the market are, well, on 1 market
- Ark doesn't do a lot of marketing/promotion. The coin was very popular on Reddit in early September, but has recently gone fairly quiet. This is understandable, considering that coins like NEO and WTC have gotten a lot of attention for their tremendous rises in an otherwise sideways market.
This may all seem like a lot of noise. And while it's important to know what's going on with the coins you've put your money into, it's more important to remember why you invested in that coin in the first place.
So today I sat down and re-read through Ark's whitepaper and roadmap and asked myself if what they're building is really something that will be valuable in the future.
In short, Ark's mission is to allow anyone to create a blockchain (with the goal of consumer adoption) that is able to communicate with other blockchains. The ark client will have an input interface setup for every major coin and you can make stuff happen on any chain Ark has a smartbridge to without ever leaving the Ark client.
The key phrase in there is Consumer Adoption. If you follow the the Technology Adoption Cycle, we are at the very most in the Early Adopters cycle. While Wall Street and serious investors (as well as the SEC) are taking a hard look at cryptocurrency, and there's a small chance your average person on the street has heard of Bitcoin, the real-world implementation for blockchain technology is yet to happen.
Think of it this way. A tiny percentage of people actively invest their money, with the majority of those people investing in the stock market. Investing will always be second to consumption.
What does this have to do with Ark? Simply put, a 40% dip of a coin mainly on one exchange in a very focused, niche market pales in comparison to the potential application and implementation that coin could have.
Of course, DYOR. But I'm getting myself some chips to take advantage of this dip.