Tezos (XTZ) rockets 30% in a week to recover $1 billion market cap

The price of Tezos (XTZ) is up 30% this week and 5% today as the proof-of-stake cryptocurrency's total market cap recovered to hit $1 billion.

Priced at $1.58, Tezos is again approaching its May 2019 high of $1.70 after losing over 50% of its value, hitting a low of $0.77 in late October this year. Since then, the Swiss-based project has rallied over 100% in the last 6 weeks after the US-based exchange giant Coinbase launched XTZ staking services on its platform.

Following its rally, Tezos is currently the 11th largest cryptocurrency by total market cap. One reason for its performance over the last week could be the impending launch of a smart contract API from Tezos block explorer TzStats. In a blog post released last week, TzStats wrote that the API represented an "exciting and important milestone" enabling developers to write applications "without the need to decode binary data or handle complex nested Michelson primitives." In simpler terms, this means that devs can use the API to browse the full history of a smart contract's state at any given block in the past.

Despite its recent surge, Tezos is still down over 80% from its all-time high of $10, back in December 2017.