MonaCoin (MONA) has seen a spectacular rise in recent months exploding off its $0.02 lows to recent highs over $0.75 a coin. Since then, the coin has dropped back down the $0.40 range where Investors have been accumulating in anticipation of another leg up.
The trading volume on MONA has skyrocketed from under $1000 USD a day to currently averaging over $100,000 per day in total dollar volume.
Monacoin (MONA) is a decentralised, open-source cryptocurrency forked from Litecoin and launched in January 2014 in Japan. Compared to its parent, the total coin supply is set to four times that of Litecoin (105 million), while the mining difficulty is re-targeted every block using the Dark Gravity Wave difficulty algorithm. The coin’s block time generation of 1.5 minutes is faster than Litecoin’s 2.5 minutes.
MonaCoin (MONA) was launched on 2channel, a top destination in Japanese online culture that boasts over 500 active message boards covering a host of different topics. MonaCoin is based on an internet meme of Mona’, a cat-like ASCII art character that describes itself as The first Japanese Cryptocurrency. Introducing the new cryptocurrency was the pseudonymous ‘Mr Watanabe’, who like the founder of Bitcoin has never publicly revealed his identity.
‘Mr Watanabe’ who is most certainly Japanese never intended MonaCoin to be a ‘national altcoin’ such as Iceland’s Auroracoin but rather suggested the coin was a game with a mission game to find its hashes such as games like Final Fantasy XIV that hard their own currencies.
MonaCoin has exploded up the charts in recent months after being flatlined for years reminiscent of Bitcoins parabolic rise. It is said that 90% of MonaCoin Investors are based in Japan. Currently at least 5 online and physical stores as well as an auction site now accept MonaCoin as payment. MonaCoin is currently traded on 5 exchanges, 3 of which are based in Japan.
The recent explosion of MonaCoin was helped along by a story on the WBS TV network in Tokyo on its program ‘World Business Satellite’ which covered a man that recently purchased a plot of land in Nagano Prefecture with monacoin.
Much of MonaCoin (MONA) parabolic rise can be attributed to Japan’s desire to produce its own native version of everything. The country has always done things its own way and was an early resistor of Facebook with Japanese youth preferring the locally-developed social network Mixi.
One has to consider that Japan is a nation of 125 million people with its own language located on an Island. Add to that the fact that anything related to Bitcoin is in english it’s easy to see why its own cryptocurrency developed in Japan and 90% Japanese owned might be such a big hit.
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As mentioned the MonaCoin is based on a Japanese ASCII character that first appeared around 2000 when a user posted the cat on 2channel complaining about internet users having too much time. Someone else responded and copied the cat and instead the speech bubble said “You too!”. Since then the cat has been used as a meme in Japan.
Currently trading at a $23 million market valuation MONA is now averaging close to $100,000 a day in trade volume up from well under $1000 a day several months ago. The decentralised, open-source cryptocurrency forked from Litecoin has become a huge hit in Japan where its said that 90% of its owners reside. Currently slated for release is a manga comic based on monacoin which has so far collected 18,000 MONA in donations.