• Solana steals the show with a 40% rally over the last week after strong selling pressure. Ethereum Classic too joins the party.
• The world’s largest altcoin Ethereum is now seeing a fresh surge in whale activity over the last few days.

While the Bitcoin (BTC) price has been flirting around $16,800 levels, some of the less popular altcoins continue to make a move and celebrate the start of 2023. Altcoins like Solana (SOL) and Ethereum Classic (ETC) have witnessed solid price pumps gaining over 35% and 25% respectively on the weekly chart.

If we see the weekly charts, other tokens like the Lido Dao Token ($LDO) and Bitdao ($BIT) have also registered over 40% gains. Similarly, the altcoin Aptos ($APT) has surged more than 21% in recent times.

Just a week back, any were speculating whether the Solana project could be dead soon. However, the Ethereum competitor chose to rise out of the abyss and delivered a strong pullback. As of press time, SOL is trading at $13.19 with a market cap of $4.8 billion.

The Solana price pump comes amid a huge volume spike and decoupling from the rest of the crypto market by a staggering 17%. In the below figure, the red line shows how Solana’s social dominance has shot up indicating that the crowd is beginning to recognize the recovery in SOL. On-chain data provider Santiment notes:

Ideally, it’s best if volume continues to climb while discussions about it stay quiet. It is also being heavily shorted on perpetual contracts right now, which is a plus for prices continuing upward.

Ethereum Classic (ETC) Sees A Nice Pump

Another altcoin that saw a strong price pump over the last week is Ethereum Classic (ETC). On the weekly charts, Ethereum Classic (ETC) is trading at more than 25% weekly gains. As of press time, ETC is trading 5% up at a price of $18,89 with a market cap of $2.6 billion.

The Santiment report notes: “Not only is volume high, but it’s also being shorted big time by traders one exchanges”. This shows that the price rally for ETC can continue going even further.

A range of other altcoins has also been performing well in recent times. For e.g. Litecoin (LTC) has had a phenomenal rally during the second half of 2022 and continues to enjoy further gains. LTC is currently trading at a price of $74.90 with 13% weekly gains. For the last year of 2022, the Litecoin blockchain attained a new record of hitting 39 million transactions and LTC use has jumped by 109% as well.

Amid other altcoins performing really very well, Ethereum (ETH) to has decided to join the party. On Wednesday, ETH surged by over 5% moving past $1,200 levels. On-chain data provider Santimenr reported that the whale activity for ETH has been once again on the rise. They added:

As #altcoins have heated up, #Ethereum quietly rebounded back above $1,260 for the 1st time in 3 weeks. Though not quite at the level of the big whale dip buys on December 16th ($ETH’s local price bottom), whales are showing increased interest again.