Key takeaways:
- Polkadot (DOT) has reached a new ATH ahead of the launch of parachain auctions, which are slated to begin later this month
- Along with DOT, the price of KSM, the native token of Polkadot’s canary network Kusama, has surged to a 6-week high
- Ethereum continues to rally and joins DOT as another top-10 digital asset to have hit a new ATH during the last 24 hours
Ever since Polkadot’s parachain auction schedule got approved in mid-October, the price of DOT has been on the upward trend. Earlier today, DOT managed to break its previous all-time high set in May and reached a historic high above $53.
Polkadot and Kusama among the biggest gainers in the cryptocurrency Top 100
Along with Polkadot, Kusama (KSM) has also recorded substantial gains of more than 15%. Kusama is the so-called canary network of Polkadot and serves as a pre-production environment for blockchain applications before they are released on the Polkadot chain.
The latest rally was spurred by a post on Polkadot’s official Twitter account. The team announced that the motion to enable “enable parachain registration and crowdloans” has been approved by Polkadot’s council. If the motion successfully passes, cryptocurrency projects interested in building on Polkadot’s parachain for the duration of 96 weeks will be able to file their application starting with November 4.
After yesterday’s announcement, the price of DOT increased from $44.6 to a peak value of $53.2, before it retraced to $52.4 at the time of this writing. In a similar vein to DOT, the price of KSM has peaked at a 6-week high of $451.
The surge in the value of DOT and KSM was not driven only by upcoming parachain auctions, but in large part due to the immense 18.9 million DOT (worth roughly $1 billion at current market rates) allocation for broader Polkadot ecosystem development, which was announced in October. Polkadot founder Gavin Wood explained that the new development fund would help boost blockchain development on the Polkadot network. According to Wood, the funds will be spent on the Polkadot community’s “ideas for building, improving, educating and indeed, anything else that the Polkadot governance believes valuable.”
While the cryptocurrency landscape is constantly evolving, Polkadot has been one of the more stable performers in the sector. For example, when Bitcoin hit $60,000 in April, DOT was ranked as the 8th largest cryptocurrency by market cap at the time. Despite all the turmoil and volatility that makes other projects fall out of favor or lose popularity over time (other than BTC and ETH), Polkadot has become one of the staples in the cryptocurrency space, thanks to an active community and continuous technological improvements.
Polkadot was not the only cryptocurrency in the top 10 that managed to break its previous ATH during today’s trading activity. Ethereum has hit a new peak price of $4,479. It took the world’s largest crypto just four days to break the previous ATH and achieve a new milestone. The success of ETH and DOT (and too many other blockchain projects to mention in this article) has pulled the total cryptocurrency market cap to $2.77 trillion – its highest value to date.
