Kraken Contest Results are in: Invest in Bitcoins, But Don’t Disregard Ethereum

There are more than 100 cryptocurrencies out there, each one with their own use case, market capitalization, and user base. Virtually anyone with the right skill-set can create their own currency. The open nature of crypto and its FOSS philosophy makes it easy for people to adopt it or invest in it.

The hard part of launching a cryptocurrency is gathering adoption from the public. The cryptocurrency space has always been a hostile place. We are living on the bleeding edge of financial technology and Kraken, one of the leading digital asset exchanges in the world, acknowledges that.

Kraken started an experiment, an international contest directed at several university business schools. The objective was to build the best cryptocurrency portfolio (Bitcoin, Ethereum, or both) with an initial investment of 1 million dollars. The Kraken Case Study Competition was open during a full week. Participants from 13 business schools located in USA, Canada, Brazil, and Portugal submitted their entries.

After a careful analysis, Kraken announced the winners–the Freeman School of Business from Tulane University took the first place; Ted Rogers School of Management from Ryerson University secured the second place; Marriot School of Management from Brigham Young completed the podium in third place.

The prizes were $10 thousand, $5 thousand, $3 thousand for the first, second, and third place, respectively. The competition showed that the business students preferred bitcoin as the main portfolio asset.

The three winners explained that, although the sanest decision was to invest the majority of funds in Bitcoin, it would be foolish to disregard Ethereum’s main token, Ether. The Tulane students (first place winners) allocated 67% of the funds to Bitcoin and a 33% to Ether. The students made price analysis on weekly charts to reach their conclusions.

On the other hand, Ryerson students decided to survey the opinion of several FinTech and financial experts about the impact of both Bitcoin and Ethereum in e-commerce and other financial sectors. According to the survey, the majority of experts favored Bitcoin, thus the students from Ryerson decided to allocate 69% of the portfolio to Bitcoin, and the remaining 31% to Ether.  Lastly, Brigham Young business School analyzed the supply and demand offers, security, liquidity, and volatility to make a conclusion–78% will go to Bitcoin and 22% to Ethereum.

Both platforms offer many opportunities, with a high growth potential. Tulane students remarked that Bitcoin and Ethereum are technologies destined to coexist, and that they don’t predate each other.