Markets
Kaspa’s KAS Token Price Bucks Broader Crypto Market Decline, Surges 26% in a Week
There’s always action in some pocket of the crypto market, even when the headline numbers don’t show much happening, just as the still surface of a lake can mask the extent of the dynamic ecosystem beneath.
This has been the case recently. Since last Friday, the negative price action of bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) reduced the total market value of digital assets by 3.4% to $2.22 trillion, painting a bleak picture of the crypto market.
This decline, however, obscures the 26% increase in the Kaspa blockchain’s KAS token. The token, ranked 27th in market value, has surpassed 18 cents and is approaching the record $0.196 reached earlier this month, according to data source CoinGecko. This makes KAS the best performing coin among the top 100 digital assets in terms of market cap.
Outperformance follows bitcoin miner Marathon Digital’s (MARA) decision to diversify its revenue stream adding KAS mining. The company said it has mined 93 million KAS tokens since September.
Kaspa’s proof of work blockchain uses the GHOSTDAG (Greedy Heaviest Observed Sub-Tree Directed Acyclic Graph) protocol to improve its performance and scalability.
GHOSTDAG prioritizes not only the longest chain but also additional blocks referenced by other blocks in the network, thus making the blockchain more secure and resilient. Traditional blockchains tend to select the longest chain to achieve final consistency, which slows down the throughput of network transactions.
KAS’s weekly gain is accompanied by a 58% increase in futures open interest to $65 million, with funding rates remaining positive, according to data source Coinglass. This shows an influx of new money on the bullish side and validates the rally in price.