The Crypto markets have risen festively for the past seven days. According to CoinGecko, the global market cap of crypto is up 6.8% in the past week to $2.48 trillion.
Crypto Market Enjoys Christmas
While Bitcoin and Ethereum have both already made stunning seven-day gains of over 7 percent, they are certainly not among the best performing coins this week.
Bitcoin’s price soared above $50,000 on Thursday. The last time it rose above this level was on December 13. At the time of writing, the price of 1 BTC token is even around $51,500. Still, many altcoins performed a lot better.
Merry Christmas to altcoins
Altcoins and DeFi tokens thus made even more profits during Christmas. Aave (AAVE) and Terra’s LUNA are both up more than 30% as more and more money flows into DeFi.
The Terra in particular exploded in the last quarter. Much of Terra’s success is due to the network becoming a mainstay in the DeFi world. As of Wednesday, the total value of Terra-based crypto projects exceeded $20 billion.
LUNA is not the only Terra crypto token to perform well. On Monday, Terra’s dollar-pegged UST DAI became the No. 4 stablecoin by market capitalization at approximately $9.9 billion.
The prices of Uniswap (UNI) and Polygon (MATIC) also exploded. Uniswap has risen by 10% in the past week and Polygon even by 29%. Their synchronized rally could be the result of Uniswap users looking to put the exchange’s smart contracts on Polygon. The move alleviates many of the costs incurred when users access the Ethereum network directly from Uniswap. Since Polygon is a Layer 2 scaling solution, which is designed to lighten the load on Ethereum.
Polkadot rose 15.4% over the week. The recent growth spurt comes after the launch of five parachains on the network. Parachains are individual blockchains that run on top of a blockchain network. These parachains help reduce difficulties in transactions. This limits the need for layer-2 scaling solutions.
Other coins also rise
Cardano (ADA) and Ripple’s XRP also posted significant gains this week. Cardano’s price is up 15.6% from last week, while XRP is up 12% this week.
Apart from Aave and LUNA, Shiba Inu had the best week. This meme coin posted gains of around 19.5% for seven days in a row. The price is now at $0.000038.
Dogecoin had a more modest Christmas. It is currently worth USD 0.19, up 9.6% from a week earlier.
The altcoin sector’s spectacular rallies this week are a strong indication that investors are seeking investment options outside of the well-known market leaders. By this time next year, the top of the crypto market could look completely different.