Arbitrage has never been simple. At first glance, it seems like a simple task—buy on one exchange, sell on another—but fees prevent the gap from completely closing, and delays in the deposit/withdrawal process can lead to losses in changing market conditions.
Traditionally, traders needed vast amounts of liquid capital to do this effectively, but cryptocurrency has changed that to a degree. With vastly reduced transaction fees and times, they can be more easily moved across exchanges, making for a more even market. At the same time, their revolutionary nature leads to unique new problems for traders to learn to profit from.
NAV Coin is one of the best examples of this. They call themselves the first “fully anonymous cryptocurrency,” and have an integrated network of servers one can optionally use to mask their identity on the network. While I haven’t researched enough to verify if those servers are double encrypted and run on blockchain technology as claimed, one claim is certainly true: they are (or were) a dark horse.
That changed in April of this year with an announcement on bitcointalk.org , which stated that NAV Coin was being upgraded to include deterministic wallets, passphrase-protected private keys, block size changes, and in-wallet messages, trading via Bittrex and a block explorer. Instead of hard forking their blockchain, they decided to start from a new genesis block with the same recorded balances to save development time.
As a result, NAV holders must manually swap their old coins (NAV 1) for new ones (NAV 2), a secure process initially facilitated by the Bittrex exchange and now explained here . Altcoin investors reacted positively to the news, and the price steadily climbed until July 1st, when it skyrocketed as a result of a press release on CoinDesk. On Poloniex , the price reached over 16,000 satoshis.
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