Polkadot Futures’ Open Interest Hits a Record US$573 Million, Flippening Litecoin
Polkadot’s (DOT) price has increased by 625% in the last 3-months. The aggregate futures open interest of DOT increased by 690% from US$73-million to US$575 million in the last 2-months. This helped Polkadot become the 4th largest derivatives market behind Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Cardano (ADA).
DOT’s rise has been so impressive that it unseated Litecoin (LTC) from its 3rd position, which the later has been holding since the dawn of futures contracts. Experts have pointed out data to say that DOT’s flipping of Litecoin is not merely a technical adjustment. They say that both the on-chain and trading metrics of Polkadot vastly outperform that of Litecoin.
This interoperability-focused altcoin has raised many eyebrows. However, experts believe that Polkadot’s interoperability between blockchains gives an enormous edge to it. This is because it facilitates users to bypass the high Ethereum gas fees, plaguing the cryptocurrency market.
However, it also needs special mention that the open interest of DOT dropped by 23% during February 21–27, 2021 as the price of DOT in the spot market dropped by 27% to US$28.
Polkadot’s (DOT) trading volume has increased significantly in January 2021 but that of Litecoin has dropped by 50% after reaching its peak at a daily average of US$13-billion. Aggregate spot trading volume of DOT at exchanges has increased by 660% to US$4.3-billion. With the rising use of Polkadot in real life, its on-chain metrics show that the daily active addresses have increased from 1,600 to 6,000. With Polkadot’s mainnet launched less than 8-months ago, the network grew by a significant 275%.
Its active addresses are still nowhere closer to Litcoin’s and Cardano’s hundreds-of-thousands of active addresses. As Polkadot is a nascent technology, it will take some time to catch up with the on-chain metrics of both Cardano and Litecoin.
From February 28, 2021, to March 04, 2021, the DOT price again incer5ased by another 13%. Polkadot’s “flippening” of Litecoin’s futures open interest signal that investors are way more interested in the new technology. This is because Polkadot comes with scaling and interoperability potential. But Litecoin’s technology is still based on a narrow-focused search for privacy via MimbleWimble protocol’s integration.
