The month of February was filled with investors’ hope that an earlier-than-expected Federal Reserve policy pivot would occur, but this sentiment faded as the inflation and employment data came in hotter than expected. While the start of the month was bullish for the crypto market, Bitcoin (BTC) retraced 60% of the move from February’s low at around $21,500 to the peak of $25,250.
Nevertheless, some narrative-driven rallies still caused significant price growth in some altcoins. The leading narratives were Bitcoin NFTs, liquidity staking derivatives (LSDs) on Ethereum and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects.
Let’s review the top performing coins of the month.
Stacks (STX)
Stacks gained much attention as the hype over Ordinals kicked off at the start of the month. Gamma, a Stacks-based project, enabled the creation of Bitcoin Ordinals. However, full functionality in trading and public minting of Ordinals on Stacks is still in development.
Meanwhile, Stacks faces competition from other blockchains like Ethereum, where developers are working toward enabling Bitcoin NFT trading on Ethereum. Yuga Labs, the leading NFT firm, announced a 300-piece generative collection on Bitcoin on Feb. 27. The auction (or minting) will likely be held on Ethereum due to the lack of infrastructure on Bitcoin. Thus, as Stacks delays its development of making Ordinals accessible, more liquid chains are taking advantage of other solutions.
The fundamentals of the Stacks blockchain do not corroborate with the price surge, which suggests that it could be purely speculative given the potential for Stack’s growth. In the short term, STX risks a pullback from the top of its trading range in both STX/USD and STX/BTC pairs. Nevertheless, if buyers can conquer resistance at $1.02, there’s a probability of STX taking a shot at all-time highs of $3.40.
STX/USD weekly price chart. Source: TradingView
Conflux (CFX)
Conflux Network received a significant boost on Feb. 15 as the blockchain team announced a partnership with the second largest…
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