The stellar price soared by 33 percent on Tuesday following its addition to cryptocurrency exchange OKEx.
It’s been a good month for projects founded by Jed McCaleb. The developer’s former project — ripple — returned the best performance of any cryptocurrency in 2017, and the token’s price has increased by nearly 1,000 percent since the beginning of December.
Meanwhile, stellar — McCaleb’s current project — has quietly surged to the eighth spot in the market cap rankings with a total valuation of just over $10 billion. In the past week, the stellar price has more than doubled, from $0.22 on Dec. 26 to $0.56 on Jan. 2, and the rally was capped off by 33 percent leap on Tuesday.
The majority of XLM trading is concentrated in BTC trading pairs, and volume is fairly evenly distributed between Binance, Bittrex, and Poloniex. The stellar price, likewise, is fairly steady across these exchanges, and the spread between BTC and USDT pairs is just two percent.
The stellar price rally appears to be tied to its recent addition to Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange OKEx, which currently ranks as the fifth-highest volume exchange. OKEx announced it would list stellar on Dec. 28, and the price began to shoot up shortly after the XLM market opened the next day.
Trading volume has been thin so far — OKEx has processed just $1.4 million worth of XLM/BTC volume during the past 24 hours — but it will likely increase as more investors return from holiday vacations and become aware of the new XLM market.
Aside from its addition to OKEx, stellar has also benefited from the recent announcement of a partnership with cryptocurrency payment processing service Pundi X that both increases access to XLM in Indonesia and could potentially lead to increased usage of stellar as a settlement tool for international trade involving the rupiah.
Write to Josiah Wilmoth at josiah.wilmoth(at)CCN.com.
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