Low-Cap Altcoins Skyrocket Following Upbit Listings—Here’s Why Traders Are FOMOing
When Upbit sneezes, the altcoin market catches a cold—or in this case, a raging fever. Several under-the-radar tokens just ripped double-digit gains overnight after South Korea’s largest exchange gave them the green light.
Pump first, ask questions later? Classic crypto.
These micro-cap projects saw instant liquidity injections from Upbit’s retail army. Never mind fundamentals—when trading pairs go live on a top-5 exchange, speculative money floods in faster than a leveraged degen spots a ’100x’ tweet.
Meanwhile, institutional investors are still busy writing ’blockchain transforms everything’ PowerPoints. Retail’s already moved on to the next shiny object.
The Top Performers
Despite the overall pullback of the cryptocurrency market in the past 24 hours, some lesser-known altcoins defied the negative trend by recording substantial gains. Two of the best performers today (May 30) include Pocket Network (POKT) and Livepeer (LPT).
The price of the former has exploded by a whopping 350% on a daily scale, currently trading at roughly $0.058 (per CoinGecko’s data). This is the highest mark observed since December last year, while POKT’s market capitalization surged past $100 million.
For its part, LPT soared by over 80% within the timeframe. As of this writing, its valuation stands at a four-month high of around $10.17, with a market cap of more than $420 million.
The most obvious factor driving the price increase is the latest announcement from Upbit. The leading Korean crypto exchange allowed trading services with the assets, listing the LPT/KRW, LPT/USDT, and POKT/KRW pairs.
Pocket Network (POKT) is a US-based decentralized infrastructure protocol that provides RPC (Remote Procedure Call) services for dApps. It is composed of full nodes that hold blockchain data and are rewarded with tokens for fulfilling requests.
Livepeer (LPT) is also headquartered in the States. It is a decentralized video streaming network built on the ethereum blockchain. It aims to provide an accessible, scalable alternative to traditional services like AWS or YouTube’s backend. Its main focus is on video transcoding, which is the process of converting raw video files into formats suitable for different devices.
Upbit’s Previous Influence
This isn’t the first time the prices of certain cryptocurrencies have headed north following support from the Korean platform. In February, the company enabled users to trade the TRUMP/KRW, TRUMP/BTC, and TRUMP/USDT, which resulted in a significant rally for the meme coin associated with the American president.
A few months later, Upbit and Binance showed support for DeepBook (DEEP), listing the trading pairs DEEP/KRW and DEEP/USDT, respectively. The asset’s valuation jumped by double digits following the disclosures.
