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Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency that has been making strong gains lately.
Ether, XRP, and a handful of other so-called “altcoins,” or alternative cryptocurrencies, rallied on Monday after the world’s best-known digital currency rallied.
At around 9:15 am ET, ether broke through the $ 600 level, a point it hadn’t reached since June 2018, according to data from industry site CoinDesk. XRP at one point climbed 29% to nearly 55 cents, hitting its highest level in over two years.
Ether was last trading around 8% to $ 595 in the past 24 hours, after climbing as much as 13%, while XRP was up 19% at around 54 cents. Both have increased by approximately 350% and 180% respectively since the beginning of the year.
Cryptocurrency investors have said that altcoins are monitoring the momentum that has seen bitcoins rise recently. Bitcoin broke through the $ 18,000 mark last week and is close to an all-time high near $ 20,000, which it hit in late 2017 before dropping to $ 3,122 the following year.
“What you generally see in space is that bitcoin goes on the run and then a period of time later – it could be a few weeks, it could be a month – the altcoins then go on the run,” Peter Wall, CEO of London The mining company cryptocurrency Argo Blockchain, he told CNBC. “Bitcoin leads and follows altcoins.”
Another altcoin, Chainlink, is up 6% to around $ 15. It is currently up over 700% since the beginning of the year.
Chainlink is often associated with a concept called “DeFi”, or decentralized finance, which aims to recreate traditional financial products such as non-intermediated loans like banks.
DeFi has become a popular theme in cryptocurrencies this year, with several new projects emerging. It was compared to the initial coin offering, or ICO, frenzy of late 2017 that saw more new virtual coins emerge.
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