The spirit of the current market has been reminiscent of a healthy bull market. However, this time the focus has been majorly on altcoins. Altcoins like Chainlink [LINK] and Tezos [XTZ] have been marching to the beat of their own drums and have proven to be among the handful of resilient altcoins. LINK reported gains worth 185% in YTD for investors, XTZ registered a strong 185%.
LINK’s massive gains overshadowed other credible projects in the market, while XTZ’s booming market has been long engaging traders.
XTZ has managed to complete three network upgrades governed by on-chain voting and became the first supported and most traded staking platform on top exchanges. It ranked third in terms of daily USD trading volume in August, as per Blockwatch’s data, and was now working towards a fourth upgrade cycle that will introduce zk-snarks [Sapling], validator, and governance extensions. These were vital growth features for a healthy state of the network.
Tezos‘ growth in the spot market gained momentum towards the end of 2019 between October and December as Coinbase and Binance introduced custodial staking services. Currently, custodians secured 25% [166 million] of the entire Tezos network [680 million, 80% staking ratio] and managed 20% [166 million] of the total supply [846 million]. Although custodial growth has hit a slow patch recently, they still grow 8% month over month combined; Binance alone gained 42% in July, as per the chart above.
Similarly, its non-custodial staking was also proving to be a success in recent times. The past three months since May 2020 have registered the strongest growth in new delegators ever recorded. With adoption catching pace, overall activity on Tezos mainnet was steadily growing.
Gas usage has reached an all-time high, due to regular spend transactions and higher delegation activity, while the number of contract calls steadily declined.
With the market preparing to rally once again in the bullish reign, alts like Tezos will be an asset to watch out for in terms of investments and development-driven growth.