Kicking off 2019 STRONG as Bitcoin rises above $4000, transaction fees drop, and Ethereum retains it's 80%+ gains and keeps on rising...

The cryptocurrency market's are off to a great start in the new year, and while there's been countless predictions saying 2019 is the year cryptocurrency has it's comeback, it's way too early to begin popping champagne bottles. Still, a good week is a good week and you won't find me complaining about it!

Let's begin by taking a look at Ethereum, as anticipation for Ethereum 2.0 seems to be drawing some buyers in to the #2 cryptocurrency, which now has gains of over 80% in the past month!

Ethereum was about $85 this time 30 days ago, at the time of publishing it's sitting at $156 with a healthy 2% gain today as well.

But the star of the show everyone's watching is Bitcoin - and it's good news there too!

Bitcoin is back above $4000, but just barely. Leaving us with the big question of 'will it hold?' and i'm not insane enough to try to answer that.

What I can say is there's no reason for it not to hold or keep going up, since one huge plus deserving of a price gain is Bitcoin's dropping transaction fees - which makes the currency more usable as... well, a currency.

At time of publishing, faster next block transactions will cost you about 4 cents, and if you're willing to wait an hour or so, as low as 2 cents.

For perspective - the last time we saw fees this low it was 2015.

Then reason behind the transaction fee drop is an important piece of good news as well - the Lightning Network has helped lower network congestion, with 5,150 nodes in operation today.

So far so good for 2019!

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Author: Justin Derbek
New York News Desk