Altcoins MNT, AVAX, ASTER Defy Market Downturn—Here’s Why

The crypto market has experienced a notable downturn over the past week, and is trading flat on the day. However, a handful of altcoins are defying this move, with some even posting double-digit gains on the day.

The biggest winner of the day is Ethereum layer-2 network Mantle, which climbed 12.1% on the day to a $5.9 billion market cap as the 37th largest cryptocurrency. The double-digit jump follows Mantle’s partnership with centralized exchange Bybit, which offers higher leverage rates and better loan terms for institutional investors.

Another notable altcoin winner is Avalanche, which jumped 10.7% on the day and 12% over the past week to a $14.5 billion market cap, making it the 15th largest cryptocurrency according to CoinGecko. It comes the day after a Bitcoin mining firm rebranded to AVAX One and bought $550 million worth of the token in a digital asset treasury pivot, causing its stock to leap 200%.

On top of this, Avalanche recorded $4.29 billion in trading volume on Monday and $4.46 billion on Friday, the highest for the token since December 2023, per CoinGlass. On Monday, AVAX experienced a spot daily inflow of $6.67 million and a futures daily inflow of $80.44 million.

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No other top 100 cryptocurrency outside of Mantle and Avalanche has made a double-digit move.

Another cryptocurrency posting significant gains is Aster, a new perpetual futures decentralized exchange on the Binance Smart Chain, which has been tipped to rival the ever-popular Hyperliquid. Its ASTER token has jumped 7% in the past 24 hours, taking it to a $2.8 billion market cap and making it the 56th largest cryptocurrency according to CoinGecko.

Aster’s move appears to be tied to the exchange’s total value locked spiking from $378 million last week to $1.46 billion at the time of writing, per DefiLlama. It also claims to have hit $6 billion in perp trading volume on Monday.

Users of Myriad, a prediction market developed by Decrypt‘s parent company DASTAN, believe that Aster has a 67% chance of continuing its move upwards from $1.70 to $2 by the end of the month.

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The fourth largest gainer of the day is AI project NEAR (up 4.2%), followed by Cronos’ CRO (up 4.2%), and layer-1 network Stellar (up 3.3%).

Meanwhile, Bitcoin and Ethereum are trading flat following a dramatic start to the week which saw $1.6 billion worth of liquidations across the crypto market on Monday.