The war between Ukraine and Russia started just two weeks ago, and the markets were quick to react: Generally speaking, outside the commodities market, the nervousness among investors has become evident, and the world’s largest stock indices have fallen at an accelerated pace.
Cryptocurrencies also precipitated a bearish trend that has not stopped so far this year. International events only encouraged cryptocurrency bears after double-digit declines over a brief period.
But every rule has its exception.
Waves go to the moon in red times
Waves, a proof-of-stake blockchain focused on providing infrastructure for dapps and smart contracts with fast confirmation times, surged 97% in the past two weeks from $11.2 on the 28th. February 2022 to a peak of $24.45 on March 8, 2022.
From there, it has corrected a bit to the $22.06 registered at the time of publishing this article on March 9, 2022.
Waves rose to popularity in 2017 when it reached the top 20 cryptocurrencies with the largest market capitalization. However, after the infamous crypto-winter, the token failed to regain its former glories, and with the rise of competitors like Solana, Polkadot, or Matic, it began to lose prominence, falling to the issue 76 earlier this year.
The recovery of the last few weeks boosted the token to 48th place in the global ranking.
A Ukrainian crypto
There is no miraculous reason for the rise of Waves, but a few factors could be listed.
The first of all is the anticipation around the Waves 2.0 upgrade. The upgrade promises improvements in accessibility, speed, and security by developing an enhanced version of Waves Consensus based on Practical Proof-of-Stake Sharding.
Also, the waves announcement a $150 million fund to spur the development of applications and protocols running on its blockchain. For a long time, the Waves ecosystem has been quiet with no notable development, so the fund could stimulate interest in the network and promote the use of the native blockchain token.
But beyond this, there is the fact that the founder of Waves, Sasha Ivanov, is Ukrainian. The token’s brutal rise – coincidence or not – was catalyzed after one of his tweets reminding the community that he was Ukrainian.
The crypto community had a strong pro-Ukrainian stance amid the war. Famous personalities such as Gavin Wood or Vitalik Buterin have expressed their solidarity with the country, which has also benefited from more than 50 million cryptocurrency donations, adding new tokens to its portfolio, including Polkadot and Dogecoin.
Perhaps they will soon accept Waves as well.
