Stellar (XLM), the 18th largest cryptocurrency by market cap was one of the few token assets who triumphed the mayhem earlier seen across the crypto market following an announcement from one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, OKEx.
UniSwap (UNI), the native token of the decentralized exchange, UniSwap also experienced an unexpected price jump following the OKEx news.
Major exchange OKEx announced a temporary suspension of withdrawals stating its private key holders are cooperating with a public security bureau in an ongoing investigation. The news reverberated across the crypto markets as within 30 minutes, Bitcoin price plunged from $11,514 to $11,190, shedding 3%. Not only BTC, but OKEx’s native token OKB also fell by 15%. The bearish forces in the market did not spare Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP) as both fell to $365 and $0.24 respectively. A drop was also noted in the aggregated market capitalization from $364 billion on Thursday to its recent figure of $356 billion.
Stellar (XLM) bullish action came following an announcement by The Centre consortium on Thursday that USD Coin (USDC) will soon be available on the Stellar blockchain latest Q1 2021.
This is a milestone development for Stellar as it marks the first time that a major Stablecoin will be hosted on its platform, thus ranking with Anchor USD, WhiteStandard, and few others. USDC is presently the second-largest Stablecoin in the market behind Tether (USDT), presently hosted on Ethereum and Algorand.
XLM/USD Daily Chart The Stellar project positions itself as a value settlement layer, claiming over 4.6 million accounts and 1 billion transfers on the blockchain since its inception. It is believed that USDC’s liquidity could help Stellar in fulfilling its mission of cross-border money transfer. Stellar (XLM) is presently trading at $0.076.
In the last few months, DeFi took the entire crypto market by storm. Alongside DeFi, new trends like NFTs (non-fungible tokens) also surged. This DeFi explosion spurred an increase in the demand for decentralized exchanges (DEXes), causing UniSwap to briefly overtake Coinbase Pro at a certain point.
The fact that newly-emerging DeFi tokens typically do not get listed on centralized exchanges in time may have informed the switch to DEXes like UniSwap.
The recent OKEx freeze accentuates the importance of decentralized exchanges like UniSwap, as seen in the unexpected price jump indicating the need for a paradigm shift in how exchanges handle customer funds.
A quant trader Qiao Wang believes that this may just be the beginning of the rise of for decentralized exchanges (DEXes), predicting that in 2021, Ethereum and decentralized exchanges would likely perform even better.
The last few weeks had the cryptocurrency market suffer the KuCoin, BitMEX, and OKEx negative events. Wang buttressed his point stating that the uncertainty around major exchanges could spur a decentralized exchange activity spike. This he stated:
“Hard to overstate the importance of 1) Ethereum L2s and scalable L1s coming online 2) What happened to Kucoin/Bitmex/Okex over the last 2 weeks Timing cannot be better for decentralized futures/swap exchanges to finally take off in 2021.”
The trader also opined that the trend will add up to the benefit of Ethereum from increased network activity and demand for scaling.
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