Low-Cap Ethereum Competitor Skyrockets by 61% This Week Amid Flurry of Futures Contract Listings

An under-the-radar, low-cap Ethereum (ETH) competitor surged by more than 61% this week as a flurry of exchanges launched perpetual futures contracts for its native asset.

Ark (ARK) is an open-source, typescript-based, layer-1 blockchain protocol that aims to be simple and efficient.

The project’s native token is trading around $0.607, up from $0.375 one week ago. The 219th-ranked crypto asset by market cap is also up nearly 11% in the past 24 hours.

The project’s gains materialized this week as three notable exchanges launched ARK perpetual contracts. Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world by trading volume, rolled out its ARK/USDT perpetual contract on Tuesday with up to 10x leverage.

On the same day, Seychelles-based crypto derivative trading platform Deepcoin also launched an ARK/USDT perpetual contract.

And on Friday, fellow Seychelles-based crypto exchange KuCoin also started offering an ARK/USDT-M perpetual contract. KuCoin’s contract has up to 20x leverage.

Futures trading is extremely risky, with the potential for big profits and devastating losses. It allows users to enter positions that are larger than their account balance, and perpetual contracts have no expiration date.

Despite ARK’s price gains this week, the asset remains 94% down from its all-time high of $10.22, which it hit all the way back in January 2018.

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