Prices for DOT, the native token of Polkadot and its cross-chain protocol for data and asset interoperability, have risen more than 40% in the last week after two votes of confidence by Binance, the biggest crypto exchange by spot trading volume.
- At the time of writing, DOT was at $7.21, according to data from Messari, up 17.27% in the past 24 hours, and up 41.36% in the past seven days.
- The currency's ascent began on Dec. 23 when Binance announced a $10 million fund to support projects on Polkadot.
- DOT really took off, however, on Dec. 28 after Twitter users noticed the ETH/BUSD pair on Binance's homepage had been replaced by the DOT/BUSD pair, giving DOT a lot more exposure.
- Some retail traders have been looking for tokens that could potentially outperform bitcoin in the short term after the No. 1 cryptocurrency by market capitalization briefly surpassed $28,000 on Sunday, according to Mable Jiang, principal at crypto hedge fund Multicoin Capital.
- Founded by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, Polkadot is a blockchain network that supports various interconnected sub-chains called "parachains."
- "Parachains" can run higher transaction throughput than Ethereum because of its more sophisticated design, as CoinDesk reported previously.
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