Altcoins AVAX and TERRA were outperforming Bitcoin over the past week, as the original cryptocurrency remained range-bound between the lower US$50,000’s and the upper US$40,000’s over the past few weeks.
With Solana’s native token SOL correcting after a massive ramp up, capital has “cycled to other projects as traders now look for new opportunities with maybe more upside,” said Justin d’Anethan, head of exchange sales at Nasdaq-listed crypto company EQONEX.
Gustavo De La Torre, business development director at n.exchange, told Forkast.News that Solana was an under-performer due to the outage it suffered. “[It is] known for being a strong player when the general market is down, [but] this week it showed that it still has some flaws to attend to.”
Over the past seven days, Bitcoin gained about 3% but remained under the US$50,000 psychological mark.
“This is the chance for alts to shine and indeed we see the Bitcoin dominance index constrained as they gain market share,” d’Anethan told Forkast.News.
Bitcoin dominance is slowly shrinking over the past month, now making up about 41.6% of the total crypto market, down from around 44% a month ago, according to data from TradingView.
AVAX — the native token of the Avalanche blockchain — surged by over 50% of the past seven days, now trading at US$63, according to CoinGecko data. The surge was most likely triggered by the news of a US$230 million investment into the Avalanche ecosystem.
A recent report from Outlier Ventures suggested that Avalanche demonstrated an explosive growth of 709.7% of total Github commits in the recent 12-month period compared to the last one.
De La Torre said the surge in commits and the successful private token sale tend to positively affect the asset’s price.
Some other significant price increases in the past seven days include TERRA, which shot up about 17%; XTZ, up 17%; and DOT, gaining over 20%.
SHIB surges
Notably, Shiba Inu token (SHIB), a memecoin named after the breed of dog that the Doge meme is based on, saw a price surge of over 34% in the past 24 hours, most likely triggered by the news of crypto exchange Coinbase listing it.
Coinbase’s customers can now trade, send, receive, or store SHIB in most Coinbase-supported regions, the crypto exchange announced earlier today. Trading for these assets for Coinbase Pro users was already supported.
De La Torre said the SHIB price surge is “more of a timing game.”
“Coinbase is aware that Elon Musk is a big advocate for Dogecoin, the ‘father’ of SHIB coin. As Musk prepared for the launch of SpaceX with civilians, Coinbase saw it fit to add SHIB at the same time to maximize on positive reaction,” De La Torre said.
Musk has set off multiple prices surges for these memecoins earlier this year with his dog-related tweets.
