Tezos Surges to Become Best-Performing Top 20 Coin

Tezos (XTZ), one of the best-performing cryptoassets of 2019, has seen another surge again over the past 7 days, making it the week’s top-performing coin among the 20 most valuable digital assets by market capitalization.

As of pixel time (11:46 UTC), XTZ is up 32.5% over the past 7 days, 6.5% in a day and is trading at c. USD 2.2. XTZ is currently ranked as the 11th most valuable cryptoasset by market capitalization (USD 1.5 billion).

While it’s difficult to point to specific drivers for the recent rally, tezos was among the cryptoassets that were hard hit during the massive sell-off of 2018, currently trading down more than 80% from its all-time high in late 2017. Consequently, some traders seem to believe the coin has a significant amount of catch-up to do if the so-called altseason kicks in.

XTZ price chart:

That sentiment was mirrored by a popular crypto analyst and founder of Quantum Economics, Mati Greenspan, who in his newsletter on Wednesday declared that altseason is already here, saying “Heck yeah. It’s been altseason mid-January.” He then went on to note that tezos is among the altcoins that “have been tracking some serious gains lately.”

In addition to the strong sentiment surrounding altcoins, however, the popular crypto exchange Binance on Wednesday announced that it is listing futures contracts for the XTZ/USDT trading pair with up to 50x leverage. According to Binance, the contracts will be available for trading starting today (Thursday).

Although listings of derivatives like options and futures contracts do not necessarily drive demand for the underlying asset by itself, it does help spread awareness of the project among investors, and can also be seen as a stamp of approval for the project by major exchanges.

Finally, looking at the chart of XTZ, the asset looks promising from a technical analysis perspective. Last Sunday, the price broke through the major resistance zone at the USD 1.85 level, which has been an area of significant resistance since October of 2018.

With that barrier now behind, there are few technical barriers left until the USD 2.4 level, and possibly all the way to USD 4.2, where previous resistance has been seen.

However, not everyone is optimistic about the recent altcoin rally: