Cryptocurrencies To Watch: Week of October 17

Keep An Eye On These Coins

The crypto market has had a fairly low-key October. While the price of Bitcoin dipped briefly below $19,000, it continues to hold around that support level. Some investors believe that the market has bottomed out and that the only way to move is up.

The reduced volatility has some investors thinking that now is the time to enter the market. We examine five cryptocurrencies that have shown price movements and activity over the past week: Huobi Token (HT), Arweave (AR), KuCoin Token (KCS), Hedera (HBAR), and Maker (MKR). In selecting these assets, we have considered several factors, including, but not limited to, positive technical developments, significant news events, and noticeable changes in price.

Huobi Token (HT)

The Huobi Token and Huobi exchange have been at the heart of one of the most frequently discussed stories of the past week. The HT token rose by a massive 60% over the past seven days, likely because of the reports of TRON founder Justin Sun allegedly being involved in their acquisition.

While Sun has denied being involved in such an acquisition, he acknowledges he is working as an advisor to Huobi. This helped boost the HT token’s price considerably. The price of HT is now around $6.88, up from around $4.31 last week.

Arweave (AR)

Arweave (AR) has jumped by 15% over the past week and is now sitting at around $10. The likely reason for this is the announcement in September of a $30 million funding round for Arweave’s native software development company, Community Labs. The funds will be used for supporting Arweave adoption, ecosystem growth, and protocol development.

Arweave is a project focused on establishing sustainable on-chain data storage. The project has also taken steps forward in terms of its development progress. This includes a testnet release and the launch of a paper on forks and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), among other things. Arweave also has enabled its permanent storage feature on the Polygon network.

KuCoin Token (KCS)

Huobi Token is not the only exchange token to show strong upward movement recently. The KuCoin Token (KCS) is also up by a substantial amount, increasing 12% over the past week.

The KuCoin exchange recently announced that there would be zero trading fees for Bitcoin and Ether trading pairs. This change in policy probably contributed to KuCoin’s increase in price. The KCS token is currently trading around $9.80.

Hedera (HBAR)

The Hedera project’s market cap recently increased by 7% to $1.49 billion, with the HBAR coin currently priced at around 6 cents.

There could be a few reasons for the project’s increase in market cap. OKX announced that it was supporting HBAR staking, while the project also announced a partnership with fund management giant Abrdn. Coinbase also said that it would re-enable withdrawals and deposits for HBAR.

Maker (MKR)

The market cap of the MKR token has shot up by 12% to more than $1 billion. The token is currently priced at around $1,070. It’s a little harder to pinpoint the reason behind this increase, but a new governance proposal might be the impetus. 

The proposal was created by Gemini exchange Co-Founder Tyler Winklevoss. It basically asked for the Gemini dollar (GUSD), that exchange’s stablecoin, to run on the protocol’s ecosystem. A portion equal to 1.25% of the exchange’s GUSD would be contributed to the protocol. The market cap for MKR was $878.3 million last week, while the current market cap has exceeded $1 billion.

Investing in cryptocurrencies and other initial coin offerings (ICOs) is highly risky and speculative, and this article is not a recommendation by Investopedia or the writer to invest in cryptocurrencies or other ICOs. Because each individual’s situation is unique, a qualified professional should always be consulted before making any financial decisions. Investopedia makes no representations or warranties as to the accuracy or timeliness of the information contained herein. As of the date when this article was written, the author does not own the cryptocurrencies mentioned above.