Just as the quiet surface of a pond might conceal the extent of the dynamic ecology underneath, there is always activity in some corner of the cryptocurrency market even when the headline stats don’t indicate anything is happening. That has been the situation lately. A bleak image of the cryptocurrency market has been painted by the negative price action in ether (ETH) and bitcoin (BTC) since last Friday, which has caused the overall market value of digital assets to fall by 3.4% to $2.22 trillion. But that drop hides the 26% increase in the KAS token on the Kaspa network. According to data provider CoinGecko, the coin, which is currently ranked 27th in terms of market value, has surpassed 18 cents and is getting close to the record high of $0.196 set earlier this month. In terms of market value, this places KAS as the currency with the highest performance among the top 100 digital assets. The move by bitcoin miner Marathon Digital (MARA) to include KAS mining to diversify its revenue stream was the reason for the outperformance. Since September, the business claims to have mined 93 million KAS coins.
To improve performance and scalability, Kaspa’s proof-of-work blockchain makes use of the GHOSTDAG (Greedy Heaviest Observed Sub-Tree Directed Acyclic Graph) protocol. In order to strengthen the security and resilience of the blockchain, GHOSTDAG gives priority not just to the longest chain but also to additional blocks that are referenced by other blocks in the network. The transaction throughput of the network is slowed down by traditional blockchains’ tendency to choose the longest chain in order to attain ultimate consistency.According to data source Coinglass, KAS’s weekly gain is accompanied by a 58% increase in futures open interest to $65 million, with funding rates remaining positive. This indicates a fresh wave of bullish capital entering the market and supports the price increase.