Altcoin Lisk Suddenly Pumps Versus Rest of Cryptocurrency Market

Lisk traded at a low Wednesday of around $0.5513 and 0.0000648 BTC. Since then, it has pumped hard relative to both currencies. LSK reached a high of $0.768 and 0.00009646 BTC earlier Thursday – a gain of more than 39 percent in USD terms and 48 percent in BTC. It has since slipped back down to around $0.645.

Lisk Pumping Hard

Lisk shares a similar price history to many other cryptocurrency assets that rode the 2017 bull market. It pumped hard to a price of over $35 in early 2018. and spent much of the next two years in decline. The price has generally moved in tandem with the wider market since. Today’s price action bucked this trend considerably. On a day that has seen very few blockchain-based currencies gain in value versus either Bitcoin or the US dollar, Lisk is a star performer. Given the history of altcoin pump and dumps, at first glance, Lisk’s recent price performance might appear to be simply a coordinated effort by a group of investors to profit from engineered market volatility. However, such schemes are usually reserved for assets with much smaller market caps. After all, it takes a lot more capital to move prices in more established, deeper markets. Such pump and dump efforts usually see a quick switch from huge buying pressure to selling too, something that is yet to occur so far in the Lisk market.

LSKBTC 4h Price Approaching Resistance
Exchange:BINANCE
Price:0.00009110 BTC
24hr Volume:90.50579628 BTC
RSI:80.10$LSK $BTC

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— ChartAlerts Crypto Scanner, Alerts & Analytics (@ChartAlertsIO) January 9, 2020

The pump’s suddenness caused one respondent to the above tweet to state:

“… just insane. someone must know something we don’t.”

Interestingly, the sudden price pump comes just a day after the wider market saw gains across almost the entire board. This prompted one Reddit user to query the lack of updates from the team behind Lisk.

Future Update Process

The Lisk official Twitter account has since informed the community that it will resume regular progress reports in February with a new format. Although this may explain the silence highlighted on Reddit, a new update process hardly explains Thursday’s pump.

We will not publish a #Lisk Development update for December. We will come back in February with a new format to report our progress in an easy-to-digest format. Stay tuned!🖖

— Lisk (@LiskHQ) January 9, 2020

A closer look at the Lisk project does reveal a few developments that might be cause for excitement for investors. Firstly, the project’s GitHub is somewhat active, with progress being made towards Lisk 3.0.0 and even an update made just hours ago. This might account for some of the recent increase in buying pressure. Another potential cause comes from the Japan-based exchange Coincheck. The platform has today become the first trading venue to offer Lisk staking. The new system, detailed in a post published today by the exchange, will reward those investors holding LSK tokens on the platform. Although other exchanges offer such services for other cryptocurrencies, this appears to be the first example of Lisk staking. The renewed incentive to hold Lisk might account for today’s buying pressure. https://twitter.com/coincheckjp/status/1215138519481384960