Illustration from Freepik
The past 30 days have been bullish for many small-cap tokens, which resulted in a drop in BTC’s market dominance from 63.5% of the total market capitalisation of all digital currencies down to less than 59%, despite bitcoin’s increase in value.
This has been a continuation of what appears to be a bull market for altcoins which was made obvious back in June with Chainlink seeing a massive surge in price, chipping away at the market leader’s dominance.
However, much of the growth can be attributed to IEO tokens. The past few months have seen immense growth for many tokens, initially sold on exchanges. Binance projects such as Elrond pumped from 12 to 250 satoshis in the span of weeks, Perlin grew from less than 200 sats per token to upwards of 750, KAVA grew from 6,000 to 75,000 satoshis.
However even these price bumps were not enough to sustain Binance’s position as market leader in terms of IEO profitability – as tokens initially sold on Huobi and Bitmax outperformed those mentioned above.
In the case of Huobi, it was Akropolis seeing a bump from less than 10 sats up to upwards of 250, whereas RSR grew from 20 sats per token to almost 250 – in anticipation of becoming the first Huobi IEO to be listed on competitor Binance’s main platform (Newton and TOP are already listed on Binance DEX but their daily trade volumes there have not surpassed $200 in a month).
But the largest story of the month has been the massive surge of small cap xDai (STAKE), from around a dollar in July to upwards of $20 in August. This massive increase in valuation alone was enough to officially crown BitMax as the exchange to look out for, when IEOs are being announced.
Thanks to a ridiculously small fundraising goal, combined with the ambitious objective of securing a more scalable and quick DAI stablecoin, the multi-chain staking token reached upwards of 40 times its IEO price, before correcting down to its support levels at 35 times the price it was initially sold at.
Combined with the success of the oracle network of DOS, the token for which also grew immensely (from a sixth of a cent to $0.38 in just two months) xDai ensured that the return on investment for BitMax IEO tokens has surpassed that of Binance. And the success of the Singapore-registered digital asset trading platform is achieved on a smaller scale, with significantly smaller volumes ($220,000 for STAKE, $180,000 for DOS) as compared to its larger competitors, it has certainly drawn positive attention.