Altcoin prices rise as traders expect a bullish market, with Blur and Arbitrum leading the surge.

Key takeaways

• The cryptocurrency BLUR has increased by 22% in the past 24 hours after being listed on the South Korean exchange Upbit.
• Trading volume across numerous alternative cryptocurrencies has significantly increased.
• Open interest for several alternative cryptocurrencies has reached record highs.

A number of decentralized finance and NFT-related alternative cryptocurrencies have seen double-digit gains over the past week as investors move their capital from larger assets like bitcoin and ether to more speculative tokens like BLUR and ARBITRUM.

BLUR, which is the native token of its namesake’s NFT exchange, has risen by over 22% in the past 24 hours after being listed on the South Korean trading platform Upbit. The listing coincided with a notable surge in trading volume, with $241 million being traded in the past 24 hours, a 1,240% increase from the previous day, according to CoinmarketCap data.

This rally represents a change in sentiment from three weeks ago when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched an offensive against alternative cryptocurrencies that it deemed as securities.

With bitcoin trading above $30,000 after weeks of stubborn price action below $26,000, traders are beginning to turn to lower liquidity trading pairs.

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On Monday, Near Protocol’s native token (NEAR) increased by over 20% after signing a deal to use Alibaba’s cloud services.

ARBITRUM has surged by 33.2% in the past 12 days as activity on the layer 2 blockchain continues to grow. Total value locked (TVL) on Arbitrum-based platforms like GMX and Radiant has increased by 12.5% and 9.3% in the past seven days, according to DefiLlama, as traders seek to capture DeFi yields.

Open interest, which is a metric that assesses the amount of open derivatives positions on a specific asset, is at a yearly high on bitcoin cash (BCH) markets, suggesting that investors are using leverage to support the recent rally.

Edited by Parikshit Mishra.