A new crypto craze is driving blockchain activity
While blue chip cryptoassets Bitcoin and Ethereum drift sideways as they hold onto market-leading gains, several altcoins are leaping higher.
XRP, Litecoin, and Synthetix have dominated market action this week, boosted by a range of factors including progress in a long-running lawsuit and the Ordinals crypto craze.
Read more after the jump.
This week’s focus
– Litecoin leaps 6% as transactions hit all-time high
– Bitcoin holds on to gains as it drifts sideways under $27K
– Meme coin expansion sends Synthetix soaring 18%
Litecoin leaps 6% as transactions hit all-time high
LTC is approaching the key psychological resistance level of $100
Litecoin is one of the top-performing digital assets in the past week, leaving Bitcoin and Ethereum behind to rise more than 6% and hit $92.
Alongside the price, activity on the network has also surged: Litecoin’s blockchain hosted a record-breaking 584,838 transactions in one day last week, according to crypto data website Bitinfocharts.
Yet these transactions are not the ordinary exchanges of value on the network. Instead, people are using Litecoin for Ordinals, a new crypto craze similar to NFTs In which digital assets like pictures or moving images are inscribed on a blockchain.
In addition to this new use case, Litecoin’s impending halving could also be driving prices higher. There are now only three months left until this event, which will reduce the cryptoasset’s inflation rate by cutting the reward for mining new coins in half.
As pseudonymous analyst BlockchainSanta pointed out on Twitter, this is often considered to be bullish as “historically, Litecoin has rallied up to +200% leading up to its halving”.
Bitcoin holds on to gains as it drifts sideways under $27K
BTC is trading in the same range that has capped gains in recent weeks
Drifting sideways at around $27K, Bitcoin appears to have found equilibrium.
Yet despite the lack of momentum, the outlook for Bitcoin could be improving, with US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell saying that stress in the banking sector might allow the central bank to ease back on rate hikes.
In addition, more institutions have recently committed to buying Bitcoin. That includes $80 billion stablecoin Tether, which has said that it will “use 15% of profits going forward to add to its existing $1.8 billion Bitcoin position.”
As eToro Global Strategist Ben Laidler points out, these recent events, along with the prestigious headliners at the recent Bitcoin23 conference in Miami, could be helping Bitcoin to “hold on to the market-leading gains it has made this year.”
Synthetix soars 18% on meme coin expansion
Riding higher on a diagonal trendline, SNX is approaching $2.5
One of the original set of DeFi protocols founded back in 2017, Synthetix is a decentralized derivatives platform built on Ethereum that allows users to spin up liquidity pools for tokenized versions of assets.
In the last week, the platform’s governance token has shot up 18% following two key proposals from the Synthetix community.
The proposals, which have now been approved, will open up eight new markets for synthetic versions of several notable cryptocurrencies, including XRP, Polkadot, and several popular meme coins.
This could bring more trading volume to the protocol, and potentially drive value to the governance token, which can be staked to receive a percentage of the fees captured by the protocol.