What Algorand’s curious price trajectory says about the altcoin

With Bitcoin and Ethereum consolidating as some altcoins see impressive rallies, many in the market are looking at this as the start of the altcoin season. Over the last few days, tokens like Avalanche, Decentraland (MANA), and Crypto.com Coin have been among the market’s biggest gainers.

On the other hand, Algorand has been tempting the market with higher gains, presenting a rather curious price action. 

Algorand’s price too seemed affected by the larger market sell-off. Its price dropped by almost 23% in four days after making a quick jump to $2.9 on 18 November, following an Upbit listing announcement. 

Upbit, a major South Korean exchange, revealed that it listed ALGO and users will now be able to buy the Algorand token using their local currency. This immediately resulted in ALGO peaking at $2.99 following a 70% price hike.

However, these levels weren’t maintained for long and soon after, the alt’s price fell to $1.8.

Nonetheless, the crypto’s network seemed to be powering growth and the same could push the alt’s price soon enough. 

Increasing institutional interest 

Over the past year, Algorand has quickly emerged as a contender in the smart contracts platform space. This, on the back of participants putting more stress on moving towards a multi-chain approach.

ALGO’s ROI v. USD over the last year was an impressive 472.75%. Furthermore, the crypto has been growing amid news like Paypal announcing it could be eyeing Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana, and Algorand in the future. 

Additionally, since protocols like Yieldly and Tiny Man have been deployed on Algorand, the demand for ALGO has increased. The same is also notable in its payment transactions which reached an all-time high of 1.02 million last week.

HODLing on the rise

With close to 15 million addresses holding ALGO, it has one of the largest numbers of holders in the space.

The number of Algorand holders has more than doubled year-on-year from 6.87 million in November 2020 to 14.94 million. 

That being said, looking at Algorand’s ownership stats, it is notable that investors form the highest percentage of ALGO owners.

Investors account for 62.3% or 64.3 billion ALGO. And, these are addresses holding between 0.1% and 1% of the circulating supply.

Finally, HODLers’ sentiment has taken over since August this year, especially as HODLers grew in number. 

This growth in investors and HODLers, as well as a decent supply distribution among different players, seemed to be pushing a good narrative for the altcoin. 

So, while there’s a lot of scope for growth as ALGO presents a decent metric orientation, its price still needs a major push.

And yet, Algorand is still down by over 40% from its 2019 ATH. To bridge its fair value gap, the alt would need to see some solid price action going forward.