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Bitcoin and ether still need to pump by about half to see their respective all-time highs. Not these cryptocurrencies.
Bittensor (TAO), the token that incentivizes competition between artificial intelligence models, hit highs over the weekend after launching in March.
TAO has now more than tripled since its first trading day, converting to 900% gains since its lows posted in May.
Bitcoin’s first-ever BRC-20 token (ORDI) also hit an all-time high last week. ORDI was minted to show that Ordinals can do (almost) everything that Ethereum’s ERC-20 tokens can, including trade at billion-dollar valuations despite having little utility beyond being a great meme.
ORDI is up more than 160% since it opened six months ago and 14 times higher than record lows posted only in September.
Read more: Ethereum won’t flip Bitcoin anytime soon, but Ordinals could change that
There’s Kaspa (KAS), the native crypto for the layer-1 blockchain of the same name. Kaspa presents itself as a follower of Bitcoin, Litecoin and Monero, in that it’s fully mineable without, purportedly, any central leader.
KAS, which can be mined alongside Ethereum forks ethereum classic (ETC) and ethereum pow (ETHW), has multiplied by almost 600 times since its launch last May. It hit an all-time high three weeks ago and has so far retraced by one-fifth.
BONK, the premier dog-themed cryptocurrency on Solana, recently flipped pepe (PEPE) to become the third-most valuable memecoin behind shiba inu (SHIB) and dogecoin (DOGE).
BONK hit its highest point ever on Saturday — $0.00001464 — after rocketing 7,500% over the past two months.
Crypto exchange tokens are even getting a run. Bitget (BGB), launched in 2020 and OKX’s OKB, first traded in 2018, are up 170% over the past year and both set price records one month ago.
Users of those exchanges can spend the respective tokens on trading fees and initial coin offerings.
Rollbit (RLB), the native crypto for the popular exchange-slash-casino, also traded at its highest point ever in November. RLB has exploded 7,500% over the past year and was first issued in March 2022.
Another four cryptocurrencies in the top 100 or so hit their own highs over the past month, but they don’t really count as they’ve only been around less than six months.
- SEI, the token for the self-styled “fastest layer-1” of the same name, set a record last week after launching in August.
- TIA, for blockchain data network Celestia, also hit an all-time high last week after launching in October.
- PYTH, for the oracle network hoping to rival Chainlink, launched in late November and set a price record only four days later.
- JTO, the DAO governance token for liquid Solana staking protocol Jito, is just scaling back from highs set two days after its Dec. 7 airdrop.
(A special mention for Solana rival injective (INJ), which launched in 2020 and floated around all-time high over the weekend but, unfortunately, didn’t quite clear it this time around.)
“Altcoin season” may seem well and truly here. Bitcoin’s dominance — which measures how much of the crypto market is BTC — has hovered around 50% for the better part of the past six months and crypto bulls could look for that figure to shrink as a major rally is confirmed.
All these cryptocurrencies indeed set highs against the US dollar over the past month. But not all have hit price records against bitcoin (BTC).
In those cases, it seems more likely that bitcoin’s own price rally played a significant role in boosting their valuations. That could convert to outsized losses should bitcoin fail to maintain its recent gains for an extended period.
What’s clear, though, is these recent all-time highs in other cryptocurrencies have barely made a dent.
Now, we all wait for bitcoin.