Investing.com Launches Cryptocurrency App

Cryptocurrency is no longer strictly a niche market. This week Bloomberg added Ripple’s XRP, Ethereum and litecoin prices to its terminal service used by international banks and investment houses. The terminals already featured bitcoin prices since 2014. Now Investing.com, one of the world’s leading financial sites, will launch its new cryptocurrency markets app on Monday for both Android and iPhone users. It is one of the first mainstream financial organizations to join the world of bitcoin-friendly mobile apps.

“We decided to launch the new app because so many people are interested in this new financial market,” Igal Stolpner, Investing.com’s head of growth, told International Business Times. “In November, we saw on our apps and websites 25 percent of all the page views were crypto pages. Which is insane. It was less than a percent four months ago.”

The regular Investing.com mobile app is used by around 5 million finance professionals. Now a crypto-centric app will also offer a live price index with charts and graphs, portfolio data, news and analysis. The company recently hired two full-time journalists, including one who used to work at a cryptocurrency exchange, for original analysis to complement news and analysis aggregated from sites such as Reuters, CoinDesk, Bloomberg and Cointelegraph.

Investing.com is partnering with around seven exchange platforms, including Bitfinex, to monitor at least 1,364 tokens in real-time. Stolpner expects that number will keep growing as the initial coin offering boom continues. “We’re getting our data directly from the exchanges,” he said. “We basically use the same concept that we have for the website, for all the other financial assets, for crypto.”

Users will also be able to set alerts for price peaks and dips to receive an automatic notification if the price of a cryptocurrency hits a certain number. Bitcoin hit yet another all-time high this week when it peaked at around $17,956 as bitcoin futures jumped to $18,000. A November survey of 565 American bitcoin users by the online loan marketplace LendEDU revealed almost 77 percent expect bitcoin investment returns in 2018 will exceed the lucrative yields of 2017.