The main means point towards the end of the tax season, during which time some cryptographers had to sell their crypto portfolio to pay taxes on capital gains to the IRS, as a possible catalyst and that can be part of it.
There are many reasons why this market will take off again. Let's look at some of the key improvement fundamentals and see why they can take this market to new historical highs this year.
1. Bittrex Reopening For New Clients
About four months ago, Bittrex, one of the largest exchanges of altcoins, was so flooded with new customers that it had to close new account records. At one time, it had 500,000 users operating at the same time, which is simply massive.
The company has been busy updating its infrastructure to handle all the demand, and this week, it finally started accepting new customers.
This is a big business because Bittrex is one of the main access roads to the altcoins market. It lists more than 100 coins, and around $430 million have been commercialized on the platform in the last 24 hours.
There are some other important exchanges that still do not accept new clients. Others, like Coinbase, are frantically climbing their customer support and teams in general.
The encryption industry is expanding massively often with the leading venture capitalists. It takes time to create systems capable of handling tens of millions of users, but it is happening all over the world.
Once all major exchanges are open again to new users, the altcoin market should have an absolute field day.
In addition, both Bittrex and Binance are planning to accept fiduciary money (dollars, euros, etc.) in the near future. This would be huge because the money could go directly into the altcoin market. (Currently, most users buy the bitcoin market first, send it to an altcoin exchange where it can be used to exchange).
2. Lightning Network Is Being Tested
The bitcoin community has been working hard to test its new ray network that could eventually make the cryptocurrency capable of processing thousands of transactions per second. (Currently, it can process around seven per second).
In essence, Lightning allows transactions to be carried out safely from the blockchain and then established again in the block chain. The blockchain is almost always the "bottleneck" in the performance of the transaction because it takes time to update a ledger in thousands of computers and encrypt/decrypt everything.
And Bitcoin is not the only currency that will benefit from Lightning. Ethereum, Litecoin and many others have their own versions of Lightning in the works.
If Lightning and other off-chain solutions work, cryptography could become more practical as a massive-scale digital currency, used for everyday purchases and other businesses. It would no longer be just "digital gold" but also cash.
3. Early Maturation Projects
Crypto is not just about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Decentralized applications that have their own coins or tokens are also increasing.
These projects are new types of disruptive businesses. They are their own banks with their own currencies. The financing mechanism is the initial offer of coins or the private offer of coins/tokens.
They are decentralized (which means that they work in a network of computers around the world) and are very difficult to censor. Most are "open source", which means that they freely share all the code / software and allow the community to contribute.
Steemit is a great example. It is a social network with its own cryptocurrency, STEEM. Users are rewarded for participating and publishing articles.
Steemit is the anti-Facebook. It gives its users an incentive to participate and does not sell their data.The site is growing rapidly and users publish thousands of articles per day.
Another example is CryptoKitties, the popular collectible game that runs as dapp in the Ethereum network.
It's early for dapps, but the potential here is tremendous.
4. SEC Goes After Cryptographic Fraud
Centra recently raised $32 million in its ICO. Boxing legend Floyd Mayweather and other celebrities backed the project, but it seems that all was not well behind the scenes.
Last week, the SEC accused Centra's fraud founders. Apparently, Centra made numerous false claims, including an agreement with Visa and MasterCard.
This and other more recent measures against fraud in the cryptographic space are incredibly positive developments. We need the SEC and other regulators to look for bad actors to discourage others from doing the same.
These are just some recent bullish developments in the world of cryptography. There are too many to list here.
If you add the continued deterioration of the legacy financial system, it has some extremely bullish catalysts.