As Bitcoin price moved higher, surpassing $26,750 on Thursday, altcoins also rejoiced with gains. The latest gains came after Monday’s brief move below crucial support at $25,000 on the back of upbeat China’s August retail sales and factory output data that has revived risk sentiment in financial markets.
Altcoins, including Tron’s TRX, jumped just days after traders sold these tokens, pricing in the possibility of defunct exchange FTX securing approval from the bankruptcy court to sell assets from its multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency holdings.
Up 3.6% in the past 24 hours, TRX is trading at $0.0838 at the time of writing while managing $260 million in volume, which has increased 25.5% from a day ago. Since Monday, TRX’s price has recorded a spike of 8.8%, and the token is now up about 10% in the past 30 days.
The price of the 11th largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $7.47 bln is currently consolidating, and if it moves up, it is facing an early point of resistance at $0.0815, then at $0.0828, and further rally will see it going to $0.085. Meanwhile, on the downside, the price has support available at $0.080 and $0.0780.
Unlike the broad crypto market, TRX’s general trajectory in 2023 has been upwards, and the taken is up more than 54% year-to-date (YTD). TRX’s price is also up 36% over the past year but down 63.8% from its all-time high (ATH) of $0.2316 that it hit in Jan. 2018.
Founded by Justin Sun, the native token of blockchain platform Tron enjoyed these latest gains as cryptocurrency exchange Huobi rebranded to HTX on its 10th anniversary with a new slogan — “HTX, Just Trade It.”
According to the exchange, in the HTX rebrand, the “H” represents “Huobi,” while the “T” represents “Tron,” and the “X” stands for the exchange. Moreover, now, Huobi’s native token, Huobi Token (HT), is also represented by the “HT” in the new name.
Huobi is not the first startup to use a name structure similar to the bankrupt exchange FTX. Earlier this year, the owners of the defunct crypto hedge firm Three Arrows Capital proposed a crypto exchange dubbed “GTX,” capitalizing on the fact that “G comes after F.” Now, comparisons to the FTX have sparked controversy for HTX with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried currently facing fraud-related charges.
Besides the controversial rebranding, another factor that could be aiding this price action is the recent surge in transaction activity. According to data from a Nansen report, Tron has been processing a remarkable average of over 4.8 million daily transactions, a measure of its growing popularity and usage among investors and traders. The number of active users in the ecosystem has been over 1.25 million, while revenue has been over $1 million in the past 24 hours.
This growth can be attributed to the burgeoning demand for cost-effective and reliable stablecoin transactions. The market cap of stablecoins grew over $45 billion between May and June, with daily transactions peaking at an impressive 13 million transactions around the same period.
Amidst all this, the total value locked (TVL) in Tron’s DeFi ecosystem is also rising. As of writing, it is at $5.78 billion, the second-highest after Ethereum’s $21.26 bln, according to DeFi Llama. With this growth, Tron’s TVL is reaching closer to its $6.7 billion peak in Nov. 2021 and, up from $4 bln at the beginning of this year and $4.9 bln about a month ago.
The Tron team meanwhile opened virtual world stores in real-time for developers’ conference attendees, and the network joined the JCBA as an affiliate. In addition, TRON DAO Ventures invested $2 million in DEX Curve.
But amidst this, TRX could face some serious price fluctuations due to impending FTX liquidations. The bankrupt crypto exchange FTX holds significant amounts of TRX, totaling $33 million, which, when liquidated, can impact the price of these assets.
On Wednesday, a judge in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware approved FTX selling, staking, and hedging its over $3.4 billion worth of crypto holdings to pay back creditors.
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A Look at Tron Competitors’ Performance
While TRX is enjoying green price action amidst a series of developments, let’s look at some prominent Tron competitors and how they are doing this week.
Ethereum (ETH)
The second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, ETH, is currently trading at $1,623, recording an increase of 5.7% since its Monday low. The crypto asset is down 11% in the past month but is in green, though by only 2% over the past year, and is also 66.7% off its 2021 peak of $4,880.
Data shows that Ethereum has been recording a surge in on-chain activity, with its daily active addresses reaching approximately 1,089,893 on Sept. 13, the second-highest. With this, Ethereum now has more daily active addresses than Bitcoin’s less than 750K.
Ethereum’s number of daily transactions has also been on the rise, hitting 1.627 million. According to data provider Santiment, this increase in on-chain activity could pave the way for enhanced market volatility and potentially a recovery in the Ether market.
Meanwhile, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently noted a growing influence on crypto technology from teams in Asia. “Five years ago, it felt like East Asia had great exchanges and great mining but, you know, very little contribution to the dev and research side,” which has “massively flipped,” Buterin told attendees of the Permissionless crypto conference in Austin, Texas. Today, in Asia, there is a “degree of deep community and technical involvement that is unlike anything I’ve seen before Covid or before any of the recent bubbles,” Buterin added.
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Binance Coin (BNB)
The 4th largest cryptocurrency, BNB, is currently trading at $212.55, up 4.4% this week but down 9.4% this past month, 23% over the past year, and 69% from its $686.31 peak from 2021.
The native token of the world’s largest crypto exchange gains from the progress made by Binance. The platform recently extended support to users in Ukraine, Morocco, Turkey, and Libya, which are struck by natural calamities. However, the exchange saw its trading volume in fiat pairs dropping by 95% since its historic high in May 2021 and plunging by 60% versus Q1, 2023, per data shared by analytical platform Kaiko.
This week, BNB Chain developers said the opBNB network is going live after months of testing. opBNB network is a layer 2 based on OP Stack, which is the set of software that powers Ethereum layer 2 blockchain Optimism. The new blockchain can process a maximum of 4,000 transactions per second (TPS) with gas costs under 0.2 gwei, fast finality under 1 second, and enhanced security.
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Cardano (ADA)
Much like ETH and BNB, ADA is also in the red by 10% in the past month and by over 47% over the past year. However, its price has jumped 5.4% this week and is now trading at $0.249.
This crypto asset has actually been on a downturn since hitting its ATH at $3.09 in 2021 and has since lost almost 92% of its value. This is despite its transaction volume seeing an increase over the last six months, which currently stands at 1.72 billion ADA, up from roughly 750 million ADA in March this year.
Price remains subdued, so much so that nearly 95.69% of ADA investors are “Out of the Money,” as per IntoTheBlock’s Historical In/Out of the Money chart. This means a mere 4% of the investors are “In the Money,” with 0.32% “At the Money.” Based on this indicator, the three main price points for ADA are $0.2640, $0.3182, and $0.3942.
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Solana (SOL)
Much like TRX, SOL is facing danger from FTX’s liquidations, whose Solana holdings are at a massive 55.75 million SOL worth over $1 billion. However, it is worth noting that more than 60% of FTX’s SOL holdings that are to be sold in the market are yet to be unlocked.
After falling just under $17.50 on Monday, SOL price has risen over 9% to $19.03. The crypto asset, however, is still down 44% over the past year and 92.6% from its $260 ATH. This month has also been a bearish one for Solana, with its price declining by 19%.
As the price jumped this week, so did the open interest by over 16% to a one-month high of $338 million, according to Coinglass. Combined with the negative funding rates, this suggests traders have recently raised bearish bets in SOL. Meanwhile, its 50-day exponential moving average (EMA) stands at $21, and its 200-day moving average at $22, further indicating the bearish sentiment.
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Polkadot (DOT)
DOT has only managed to rise 4.6% this week’s low and is currently trading at $4.09, representing a negative performance of 14.3% in the past 30 days and 42.4% over the past year. Much like other altcoins in this list, except for ETH and TRX, DOT has also lost 92.56% of its value since its 2021 high of $55.
However, according to blockchain analytics platform Santiment, Polkadot and its canary test network Kusama (KSM) are currently seeing more development activity on GitHub than Cardano after the latter outpaced them earlier this summer.
Both Polkadot and Kusama registered 570.1 Github commits in the past 30 days, leading all other crypto assets, with Cardano coming in third with 548.77 Github commits. Development activity shows “which projects are putting in the most effort to improve and innovate their existing products,” stated Santiment.
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Avalanche (AVAX)
With the lowest percentage of gains at 1.86% this week among the coins on this list, AVAX is trading at $9.30. This TRX competitor has recorded over 20% losses in the past month, 51% over the past year, and is down by nearly 93.6% from its ATH.
Unlike price, the development activity for the blockchain remained steady during the bear market, as per Luigi, head of DeFi at Ava Labs. However, despite this high development activity, network activity has been going down, with Avalanche’s fees falling over the last three months, much like its TVL.
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Aptos (APT)
A relatively new blockchain in the smart contract platform space, Aptos was founded by ex-Meta employees. Its token APT has a market cap of $1.2 bln and ranks at 39th. At the time of writing, APT has been trading at $5.17 after increasing 5.5% in value this week.
The token’s price has declined 18.7% in the past month and is down 74% from its peak of almost $20 that was hit in Jan. this year. APT is currently looking at a bearish event with 20 million APT tokens to be released in November, according to data source TokenUnlocks. This impending unlock equals over 8.5% of Aptos’ circulating supply of 235.02 million. Additionally, it is worth about $100 million, while the token recorded only $55 mln in trading volume in the past 24 hours. In addition to this, there is bearish pressure from FTX’s $67 million APT.
Amidst this, DEX Sushi expanded to Aptos, which already has DEXs PancakeSwap and Liquid Swap on its platform. Meanwhile, just last month, Aptos Labs, the developer behind the blockchain, joined forces with Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service.
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Near Protocol
Trading at $1.11, NEAR is up 3.7% from this week’s low, which came on Wednesday. This altcoin has suffered the most over the past year, with its price plummeting 74.4% during this period and being down 94.55% from its $20.44 ATH in Jan. 2022.
Recently, Circle, the issuer of USDC, launched its stablecoin natively on the NEAR Protocol, enabling users to access USDC natively on the NEAR blockchain via Circle Account and Circle APIs.
Amidst this, the protocol’s daily active user count reached a YTD high of 926,943 earlier this month, up from 36,211 at the beginning of the year, according to data from Token Terminal. Similarly, the number of daily transactions on the network also surged to its highest level for the year at 3.17 million, which has since declined.
Click here to learn all about investing in Near Protocol (NEAR).
Concluding Thoughts
So, as we saw, Tron’s competitors are currently struggling to gain traction while facing bearish pressure while Ethereum remains the dominant force in the crypto market. While prices are in green this week, volatility is ahead for the entire industry, with FTX’s selling and macroeconomic factors like rising inflation and quantitative tightening continuing. As such, it remains to be seen just how prices would react!
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