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(Kitco News) - Dino coins, a term used by cryptocurrency traders to describe older tokens that have survived through multiple bull/bear market cycles, have been surging higher over the past week as the momentum generated by spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund filings has moved beyond BTC to other tokens that have good decentralization, liquidity, and exchange support.
The top-performing dino coin has been Bitcoin Cash (BCH), a token that emerged from a fork of the Bitcoin network in 2017 after a disagreement within the Bitcoin community around increasing the block size to enable more transactions and increase scalability.
Data provided by TradingView shows that beginning on June 20, BCH price began to charge higher, stair-stepping its way from $105 to a high of $328 on Friday, an increase of nearly 212% over the past ten days.
BCH/USD Chart by TradingView
The token has been especially popular in the South Korean market, with data from CoinGecko showing that the BCH/KRW trading pair on Upbit has seen a volume of over $907 million in the past 24 hours.
Litecoin (LTC), a token that was created based on the Bitcoin code but with added modifications to increase the block size and circulating supply, has also seen a resurgence since June 15.
Data from TradingView shows LTC has increased by 55% since the BlackRock filing, climbing from $72 to a high of $111.55 on Friday amid a spike in its 24-hour trading volume, which increased from $390 million on Thursday to $3 billion currently.
LTC/USD Chart by TradingView
Aside from the momentum generated by the flurry of spot BTC ETF filings, Litecoin’s price is also receiving a boost due to the network’s upcoming halving, predicted to occur on August 2, which will cut the Litecoin block reward from 12.5 LTC to 6.25 LTC.
Halvings have historically been bullish for token prices. Bitcoin’s next halving is predicted to occur sometime around April 16 and has been credited with some of the uptick in momentum and optimism in recent weeks as the crypto market has a history of rallying during the year leading up to previous Bitcoin halvings.
Ethereum (ETH) is also considered a dino coin by many, even though the second-ranked crypto by market cap is now considered to be a foundational piece of the crypto ecosystem due to its dominance in regard to the number of smart contracts launched and its expansive decentralized application ecosystem.
Data from TradingView shows Ether has increased by 19.6% since June 15, rallying from $1,626 to a high of $1,946 on Friday with a 24-hour trading volume of $10.5 billion.
ETH/USD Chart by TradingView
Along with the momentum generated by the recent ETF filings, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and Ethereum are all included in the list of assets supported by the recently launched EDX exchange, which is backed by Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paradigm, Sequoia Capital and Virtu Financial. Many have speculated that this has provided additional interest in these tokens and directly contributed to their price increases over the past two weeks.
Some of the other dino coins that have rallied since June 15 include Bitcoin SV (BSV), which has gained 75.7%, a 41% increase for Stellar (XLM), a 38.3% increase for Zcash (ZEC), and a 34% gain for Ethereum Classic (ETC).
BSV/USD vs. XLM/USD vs. ZEC/USD vs. ETC/USD 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
The total cryptocurrency market capitalization has also risen in lock-step with the rising price of Bitcoin and dino coins, increasing from $979 billion on June 15 to its current value of 1.153 trillion, a gain of 17.8%.
Total cryptocurrency market capitalization. Source: TradingView
An analysis of the long-term price charts for the dino coins listed above shows that they all experienced notable price increases near the beginning of previous bull market phases. The data also shows that momentum for dino coins can start to fade as traders flip profits into the broader altcoin market to capture the outsized gains that occur for some of those tokens, which typically outperform the top cryptos by market cap percentage-wise.
Experienced crypto traders are aware of this correlation, and have started to plan accordingly.
The future millionaires of next bull market are the ones grinding now
— Johnny (@CryptoGodJohn) June 30, 2023
