The Biggest Winners of This Week's Crypto Rally? MINA, Chainlink, and PEPE

The crypto market is no stranger to volatility, and this week has been no exception. While Bitcoin stole the spotlight, fueled by the recent excitement surrounding the possible introduction of spot ETFs, several altcoins have also made significant moves

Among them is MINA, the native token of the Mina Protocol, which saw an impressive surge of nearly 120% in just one day, propelling it to a price of $0.92 on Tuesday, a price not seen since March. The token has, however, cooled since the latest spike.

Despite experiencing an 18% drop in the past 24 hours, MINA remains up 76% for the week, trading at $0.65 by press time, per CoinGecko.

The sudden spike comes amid an announcement from South Korea's largest crypto exchange, Upbit, that it is listing the MINA-KRW (the Korean won) trading pair. Since trading opened, MINA has become the largest trading pair in Korean fiat currency, accounting for as much as $419 million, or 12% of Upbit’s fiat trading volume.

Originally known as Coda Protocol, Mina rebranded in September 2020 due to a legal dispute with R3, an enterprise blockchain company that also utilized the name Coda for its protocol.

The underlying tech, however, remained the same. While Ethereum's blockchain currently stands at a massive 1.3 terabytes, according to Etherscan, Mina's blockchain—thanks to its use of zero-knowledge proofs—maintains a permanent size of just 22 kB, no matter how many transactions are committed to the network.

This extreme difference in size makes syncing the Mina network a much more accessible task for the average user.

Injective, Pepe and LINK follow suit

Other notable gainers over the past seven days include INJ, the native token of the Injective Protocol, the popular meme coin PEPE, as well as Chainlink’s LINK.

Over the span, INJ is up 51%, PEPE soared 57%, whereas LINK is up 50% in the same period.

Another altcoin to post significant growth over the week is RUNE, the native token of the THORChain network, which is up 41.3%

Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), the industry’s two largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, are up 19.8% and 12.9%, respectively.

BTC enjoyed plenty of attention in recent days amid speculations of an imminent launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs took its price above $35,000 on Monday.

Its price has since somewhat stabilized—at the time of this writing the leading cryptocurrency is changing hands at $34,183, down 0.7% in the past day.

Edited by Liam Kelly.