Cosmos-based Tokens Post Healthy Gains as Crypto Markets Trade Sideways

Though the broader crypto market cap only grew by 0.1% over the past day, indicating a slow day for many large cryptocurrencies, a handful of tokens in the Cosmos ecosystem are faring much better. 

With a market cap of about $29.5 billion, Terra’s LUNA is the ninth-biggest cryptocurrency in the world. LUNA is essential to Terra’s wider crypto project as the currency is used to peg the prices of Terra stablecoins, like the dollar-pegged UST or TerraGBP.

The mechanism is simple. To mint any Terra stablecoin, the equivalent value has to be burned in LUNA. One dollar’s worth of LUNA has to be burned to make one UST. The higher the demand for Terra’s stablecoins, the better LUNA tends to do. 

Today, LUNA trades for around $83.38, posting a modest overnight increase of 4.3%.

Other Cosmos coins are hitting higher targets. The native token for the decentralized exchange (DEX) Osmosis saw overnight growth of 6.8% as it grew to just over $10. That’s a dollar short of its all-time high of $11 set more than a week ago on January 12.

The total value locked (TVL), a metric that refers to how much money is sloshing around in a project, in DeFi protocols on Osmosis grew 3.6% overnight to hit an impressive $1.4 billion, according to DeFiLlama. 

The last time the TVL in Osmosis surged this month, it was part of another ecosystem-wide rally. 

The Akash Network (AKT) was another significant mover. The network is a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace for leasing cloud computing resources. The native token of the project, AKASH, grew 6.7% overnight and currently trades at $2.24. 

But the largest overnight growth among Cosmos coins was seen by the ecosystem’s native ATOM token. Atom is up 7.2% to trade at $39.

A primer on the Cosmos

Cosmos describes itself as an “internet of blockchains.” In effect, it’s a large network of independent, parallel blockchains. 

Thanks to its common architecture, users can plug into any Cosmos blockchain and pass tokens freely across them without the need for permission or an intermediary. 

The ecosystem’s modularity is also a boon to developers, who can use the Cosmos developer kit to build decentralized applications using the same code for different blockchains.

Another driving factor in today’s Cosmos token rally could be down to the fact that Swiss crypto investment company 21 Shares announced today that it’s listing the world’s first ATOM Exchange-Traded Product (ETP). 

The 21 Shares ETP will trade against the U.S. dollar, the euro, and the Swiss franc on Switzerland’s SIX exchange. 

Similar to an ETF, an ETP is a financial product that enables investors to capitalize on the growth of a specific cryptocurrency with fewer risks than directly purchasing it.