Why Polkadot is Up Over 12% Today?

Polkadot (DOT) has bypassed Dogecoin (DOGE) to become the 10th largest cryptocurrency by market value on Monday. The move comes after the rally that pushed DOT price nearly 12% higher during the past 24 hours.

Polkadot, an open-source protocol that connects previously incompatible blockchains, increased by 12% since Sunday, climbing from $9.43 to $10.62 today, according to the data of Coingecko. 

Following the price rise, the market capitalization of Polkadot (DOT) reached $11.435 billion. It surpassed the popular meme coin DOGE, whose market value sits at $11.282 billion as of the time of writing.

What Drove DOT Price Up?

The increased demand and higher than usual trading volumes last Friday have pushed DOT’s price from the lows of $8.56 to the $9.3 level to settle it as the new support zone. 

The optimism returned helping to push DOT even higher while breaking the 100MA at $9.48 and soon after the 200MA at $9.77 on the 1-hour price chart. Following the momentum, the DOT price broke the resistance of $10.33 to test the highs of $10.62. However, it failed to maintain its position and dropped back to $10.10 later on Monday.  If DOT succeeds to break through the $10.70 resistance, the price rally to the $14.80 may be expected.

Apart from that, the price rise of DOT appears to be driven by the increasing interest in various protocols, which operate within the Polkadot’s ecosystem. Multiple generated over 25% gains during the previous week.

One of them, the DeFi platform Acala (ACA), has raised a $250 million fund to support the growth of its stablecoin aUSD. The tokens price spiked nearly 33% in several days, jumping to $0.4457 on Sunday.

Another protocol built on top of the Polkadot, Astar (ASTR) rallied after the partnership announcement between its money market AstridDAO and Microsoft on May 25. The value of ASTR shot instantly driving the price up by 56% to $0.0867. Although the coin later corrected losing almost all of its gains, its price jumped up by 16% during the weekend and reached $0.0663 earlier on Monday.

Moreover, the U.S. first publicly traded fund that invests exclusively into DOT, Osprey Pokadot Trust (ODOT) started trading last week via the over-the-counter market. The move is expected to bring more investors into Polkadot, including the institutional ones. 

In addition to that, the governance community of Uniswap voted to deploy decentralized exchange (DEX) on Polkadot’s parachain Moonbeam and Gnosis chain earlier in May. Uniswap is currently Ethereum’s most popular DEX and the third-largest DeFi protocol with $7.04 billion of total value locked.  

On the Flipside

• The projects built on top of Polkadot (DT) are growing, and the protocol itself has a solid real-world value, suggesting that the Polkadot’s growth trajectory could be much larger. However, if DOT fails to break through the $10.70 resistance level, the price could fall further to $8.30 in the short term.