They aren't as popular as BTC or ETH. They aren't meme-worthy like DOGE. They're the stolid, backbone trading tokens of exchanges, and some have had great short-term runs of late (emphasis on the short-term.)
How great?
Here's a quick look.
7-day returns (at time of writing 11/5/21)
- Bitcoin (BTC) -1%
- Crypto.com (CRO) +80%
- Binance (BNB) +16.95%
- OKEx (OKB) +9%
- KuCoin (KCS) +7.0%
Not all exchanges have seen these solid gains with Uniswap roughly at par with Bitcoin's rise. FTX(FTT), dYdX 1INCH, and KuSwap all underperformed ranging from a losses of - 3% to -14%.
These tokens tend to run through significant up/down cycles, sometimes in line with general Bitcoin trends, but often enough to have short runs outside of the mainstream (*e.g. DyDx doubled in the last two weeks of Sept. and is now down modestly -5% on the 7 day.)
Exchange tokens are generally used to pay for trading fees and in some cases generate additional returns (e.g. KUCOIN pays out a variable daily % rate depending on how much trading volume is occurring on their platform).
While no one knows what the future holds, and past performance is no guarantee of future price movements, these often overlooked tokens may give some good returns.
As always, not financial advice, and do your own research. To help with that here's an exchange token watchlist on CoinMarketCap. If you have others exchanges to add, let me know in the comments.
Photo by Behnam NorouziUnsplash
