As the broader crypto market rode on a bullish sentiment, Mina Protocol’s $MINA led the gains with a 100% jump in price within 24 hours. It took the token to trade at $0.921, a price level not seen since early March.
The parabolic rise has been mainly attributed to Upbit’s 24 October announcement saying that it will be listing Korean won (KRW) trading pair for $MINA on its exchange.
Upbit is South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of trading volume and customer base, with over 180 crypto coins/tokens listed and over 300 trading pairs. Its ecosystem comprises Upbit Exchange, NFT Marketplace/Drops platform, and its Staking services.
The new addition of a KRW pairing for MINA will facilitate the buy and sell of the coin, making it easier for Korean users. The news triggered a wave of buying activity and FOMO among Korean, as well as global traders, driving up the price of $MINA to monthly highs.
As per data, the volume of Mina tokens traded in Upbit in the past 24 hours surged to over $1.1billion. It was followed by exchanges like Binance, which also handled heavy amounts of over $225million. Other exchanges which list $MINA include Kraken and KuCoin.
Bullish sentiments were further amplified by Bitcoin’s move above $34,000 today, briefly touching $35,000 before coming back to trade at around $33k at press time. It has risen by over 18% in the past one week and is up by 9% in the last 24 hours.
On 24 October, Mina Protocol sent out a post on X (formerly Twitter) saying that its network is currently experiencing extremely high levels of transaction volume. This has resulted in high demand for SNARK workers. It then encouraged community members to spin up additional nodes to address the demand for SNARK work and aid network processing.
On Tuesday, the network also saw large derivatives trading activity with volumes increasing by 15,000%, as of writing. The volume surpassed $2bn, with the open interest or outstanding contracts surging by 800% to $116m, as per Coinglass data.
Mina calls itself the “world’s lightest blockchain”, powered by participants. The mainnet utilises zero-knowledge proofs. This keeps the size of blocks constant regardless of the increase in usage, meaning it wouldn’t require more computer power or memory even if the network grows in size.
Instead of checking through every single transaction from the past, the blocks are made by just checking a small summary, also known as zk-SNARK proofs, making the process fast and efficient. $MINA is the digital asset utilised in the network, which is used for utility tokens and proof-of-stake stakings on blockchain networks.
As observed in the past, the rallies followed by a coin’s listing on a leading exchange is often short-lived. Therefore, Mina token retreating in price from its recent climb could be expected in the coming days.
