Launched yesterday, the ASTER token, from the Hyperliquid competitor platform of the same name, saw its price climb 1,350%. Let’s take a look back at this crazy performance.
The price of the ASTER token skyrockets after its launch
On Wednesday afternoon, Hyperliquid’s competitor (HYPE) Aster launched its eponymous token. Since then, the price of ASTER has skyrocketed by 1,350% and is now trading at around $0.44 at the time of writing:
Beyond the fact that it is a new launch on the market, to understand the reason for such a surge, we need to look at Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the founder of Binance, who tweeted about the token on Thursday evening when the asset was still trading at just $0.17:
In reality, the decentralized exchange (DEX) for perpetuals is backed by YZi Labs, CZ’s investment fund and crypto incubator. We briefly mentioned this last May, when CoinMarketCap launched a new tool for farming airdrops and the Aster project was featured.
For now, the token is essentially only available for spot trading on the Aster DEX, but it is likely to end up on Binance sooner or later, given the project’s links to the ecosystem.
A serious competitor for Hyperliquid?
In a way, Aster is Hyperliquid’s competitor on the BNB Chain. And for good reason, as the application offers both spot and perpetual trading pairs.
However, one of the major differences is that Hyperliquid is a standalone ecosystem with its own blockchain, whereas Aster relies on the underlying blockchains of the BNB Chain and Arbitrum (ARB).
According to data from DefiLlama, the total value locked (TVL) on Aster skyrocketed on Wednesday, rising from $386.56 million to $2.03 billion. In reality, it’s a safe bet that this isn’t just a real influx of new liquidity, but rather the presence of the new ASTER token in the count, whose unlocked supply is already worth over $680 million.
While Hyperliquid’s DEX has a TVL of $665 million, its perpetual volumes are $335.56 billion over 30 days, compared to Aster’s $15.55 billion over the same period.
With the hype surrounding this new token, these volumes could increase in the coming days, but the real assessment will have to be made in a few months’ time to judge the sustainability of any growth.
In addition, Aster has encountered some issues with withdrawals on Arbitrum due to high demand, but has stated that funds are secure and that it is working on the issue.
For its part, the price of Hyperliquid’s HYPE is $58.44, up 6.8% over the last 24 hours.
