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- Polkadot (DOT) has risen by 120% in the last seven days and has taken sixth place in the ranking of all cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
- According to some experts, Polkadot (DOT) has the potential to become one of the top-3 cryptocurrencies.
After the developers of Polkadot removed the last admin rights of the Web3 Foundation on July 21st, the project around Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood officially merged into mainnet a little more than a month ago. Since then Polkadot has been attracting the attention of investors. Over the past few weeks, Polkadot (DOT) has secured sixth place in the ranking of all cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, ahead of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin SV (BSV) and Cardano (ADA).
The road to get there was an eventful one. The cryptocurrency was listed on several exchanges, including Binance and Binance, at a price of around USD 3 on August 19. After the start of trading, DOT initially peaked at USD 5.75, whereupon an immediate reversal took place and the DOT price fell rapidly to as low as USD 2.50.
The slump was followed by a period of consolidation, with DOT showing a steady upward trend since Monday. At the time of writing, DOT was trading near its all-time high, at USD 6.46. Within the last 24 hours, DOT has thus recorded a slight drop of around 1.0%, while the weekly chart is showing a massive gain of around 120%.
According to some experts, this upward trend could continue. Analyst Cantering Clark said yesterday that DOT will soon challenge Chainlink (LINK) for fifth place by market capitalization. In this context, Clark referred to the increasing trading volume of DOT, which could indicate a renewed increase:
Look how clean $DOT is looking. Awesome LTF trend. Ton of volume coming in. This is a good horse to have in the race.
One factor that may be driving Polkadot’s (DOT) trading volume is the introduction of Polkadot margin trading with a maximum leverage of 3.3x on Bitfinex, announced in a blog post two days ago. Clark is also not the only Polkadot bull.
Kelvin Koh of Spartan Black, a major cryptocurrency fund based in Asia, wrote via Twitter in mid-August that Polkadot (DOT) should reach $5 based on Cardano’s market capitalization. A little later, his prediction came true, and he made another forecast:
Another prediction: within a year $DOT will be Top 3 market cap on Coingecko/CMC.
What makes Polkadot (DOT) so promising?
One of the main reasons for Polkadot’s rapid rise in price could be the comparisons with Ethereum. The booming DeFi ecosystem, which is primarily based on Ethereum, has led to a severe overload of the Ethereum network with high fees. Polkadot is considered by many experts to be a potential challenger, as it scales better and thus Ethereum could lose market share in the medium term.
On the other hand, the project positions itself as a cross-blockchain protocol that can transfer any kind of data, not only tokens, between different blockchains. Besides the strong technology, the name Gavin Wood could also play an important role. Wood is considered a key figure in the development of Ethereum’s programming language Solidity, as well as in the growth of the Ethereum network through his company Parity Technologies. In addition, Polkadot can already point to 199 projects that build on the network. All in all, Polkadot thus brings a lot to the table.
