The NuCypher price popped 710% on Friday, taking the cryptocurrency's market cap above $2 billion.
That's not quite the market cap of Bitcoin (BTC) or Ethereum (ETH), which are over $1 trillion and $448 billion, respectively. But growth is growth. And cryptocurrencies well-liked by the market are expected to pop with BTC as it rises to all-time highs.
The BTC price currently sits above $60,000, so NuCypher could be one of the coins that gets another pop in the next few months.
In fact, one NuCypher price prediction says the crypto could rise to $49.79, which would be a 3,730% rise from today's price.
Here's what Nucypher (NU) is, why Nucypher popped so big the other day, and what we think the future looks like for this crypto.
Why Did the NuCypher Price Just Pop?
One of the things that makes cryptocurrency such a speculative investment is that the prices can rise or fall for any old reason.
Just like a band of Internet traders can pump a stock and then dump it a few hours later, cryptocurrency prices take that to an even further extreme. The market never closes. Anything can happen.
In the case of NuCypher, the token happened to be celebrating its one-year anniversary.
That news sent the coin flying from $0.29 to $2.35 in a single day.
It wasn't that news alone, however.
An honest NuCypher price prediction would have to include a multitude of factors in play right now. And the big one on everyone's mind is the price of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is entering a bull phase, up 31% in the last month. As usual, Ethereum is following that trajectory, up 15% in the last month.
They have much further to go, if the latest Bitcoin price prediction has anything to say about it. The case for BTC going above $100,000 by 2022 is more believable than not.
Whether a coin like NuCypher can follow suit depends on the two usual elements of a crypto's success: adoption and design.
Here's what NuCypher looks like and what it would need to rise with the best of the cryptos.
What Is NuCypher?
Cryptocurrencies make names for themselves by solving important problems using blockchain networks. Some have a major focus on decentralization, some focus on transaction speed and sustainability.
NuCypher is a privacy-focused Ethereum token.
There's a common tension in cryptocurrency between decentralization and privacy. Imagine the extreme difference between having a police station (centralized) and everyone in the neighborhood policing each other (decentralized).
The great thing about crypto is that you don't have to choose between a police station and no police station - artificial intelligence (AI) does the work, so human error is mostly out of the picture.
Luckily, you don't have to choose whether or not you want the movie Robocop to be real just yet. The work AI helps within the case of tokens like NuCypher is that it provides a layer of security on the blockchain for decentralized apps.
The aim is to give people the ideal combination of freedom and security. People want to be able to share data but also keep it secure, and that's what NuCypher's encryption allows.
How it works is that someone on the blockchain "owns" the information that's being shared, and that owner can grant rights to whoever is on the receiving end of the information.
Why the NuCypher Price Could Keep Going
Like many other cryptos, you have to distinguish here between the network and the token itself. NuCypher, the token, can be owned and staked by users. This enables them to operate NuCypher nodes and gives them voting rights on the direction of the NuCypher network.
And since NuCypher is meant to work as a second Ethereum layer, NU tokens can be exchanged for other tokens on the Ethereum network and used with a range of Ethereum-based apps. That compatibility is a big deal for a cryptocurrency as well.
As we mentioned earlier, people like privacy coins because they try to solve the problem of operating on a public blockchain while keeping certain information private.
Other well-known privacy coins like Monero (XMR) and Dash (DASH) exist. These, and many others, perform variations of the same function, keeping information safe. The difference today is that they have much higher market caps than NU, more than $4 billion and $71 billion, respectively.
So far, adoption has been overwhelmingly in favor of these bigger coins. But we are still so early in the game, we could see the privacy coin competition play out in several unexpected ways as people decide what they like or don't, and protocols will get shaken out.
NuCypher celebrating its own one-year anniversary sent people searching for the network and rocketed the price. As crypto continues on this bull run, and people start to think they like NuCypher's protocol compared to other privacy coins, NU will see plenty more life in 2022.
NuCypher Price Prediction for 2022
According to Sidharth Sogani, CEO of CREBACO Global, a crypto research firm, "conservative estimates" have the NU price at $3 by 2022.
Digital Coin Price says the price of NuCypher could reach $5.50 by 2025.
For the longer term, Wallet Investor says the cryptocurrency could hit $49.79.
A growth target of $49.79 represents about 3,730% growth from today's price of $1.30.
That's all the more likely if Bitcoin hits $100,000 this year. As long as the NuCypher protocol can prove itself and stay on investor radars.
Of course, all of these forecasts involve gains of double or more. That's all a matter of time and how the market's adoption of crypto unfolds.
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About the Author
Mike Stenger, Associate Editor for Money Morning at Money Map Press, graduated from the Perdue School of Business at Salisbury University. He has combined his degree in Economics with an interest in emerging technologies by finding where tech and finance overlap. Today, he studies the cybersecurity sector, AI, streaming, and the Cloud.