Band Protocol (BAND) – a decentralized oracle network – has recently become one of the hottest DeFi coins, with news of multiple integrations and a Coinbase Pro listing sending its price to fresh all-time highs earlier this week.
The cryptocurrency has been able to hold on to most of these gains and has amassed a $162 million market cap as a result.
One of BAND’s major competitors at the moment is Chainlink – which has also been caught in the throes of a strong uptrend.
A comparison of the two assets market capitalizations shows that BAND still has massive room for growth.
Unlike Band Protocol, however, Chainlink’s network is operational at the moment, which is a key difference that investors must bear in mind.
Band Protocol maintains the bulk of recent gains despite market-wide weakness
The entire cryptocurrency market is flashing some signs of weakness today as Bitcoin and Ethereum both incur slight downtrends.
The Band Protocol token, however, has been able to hold on to the majority of its recent gains, with investors still being excited about the recent Coinbase listing as well as news of integrations.
At the time of writing, BAND is trading down four percent at its current price of $7.75. This marks a slight decline from its recent highs of $8.50 that were set at the peak of its latest uptrend.
The cryptocurrency is trading up significantly from its multi-day lows of $3.80.
As CryptoSlate reported, the two primary pieces of news that catalyzed this uptrend were the recent addition of BAND to Coinbase Pro as well as news regarding the integration of the protocol’s oracles into the Elrond blockchain network.
Band Protocol is currently trading up 32x from where it was when it started the year.
Chainlink is still 25x larger than BAND
Ryan Watkins – an analyst at Messari – recently observed that another factor driving BAND higher is that investors are using Chainlink as an anchor for the value of other oracle networks.
He does note that the key difference between the two networks is that Chainlink has a live product, while Band Protocol is still rolling out their mainnet.
Regardless, the disparity between the two token’s valuations could suggest that BAND has further room to grow – a possibility Watkins mused:
“This key difference may explain the still large valuation gap between Chainlink and Band (in addition to Chainlink simply being overvalued). Or it could suggest there’s still room to go.”
Although BAND being 1/25 the size of LINK in terms of market capitalization doesn’t mean that the token’s price will rise by this multiple, it does show that there is still serious room for growth.
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