Top Crypto Gainers of the Week: Which Coins are Leading the Surge?

A number of coins and tokens on the Brave New Coin market Cap top 50 had strong weeks. There were alpha standouts that enjoyed 7-day gains exceeding 40%, including Stellar (XLM), Celestia (TIA), Polkadot (DOT), and Uniswap (UNI).

XLM was the best-performing asset in the top 50. Stellar (XLM) is a payment protocol that aims to connect banks, payment systems, and people. It is an open-source protocol for value exchange founded in early 2014 by Jed McCaleb (formerly a key member of the Ripple team) and Joyce Kim. The Stellar protocol is supported by a nonprofit, the Stellar Development Foundation.

Asset Manager Grayscale recently filed a 10k in preparation to launch an investable Stellar Lumens trust in the United States. In a tweet, Stellar founder Jed McCaleb described Stellar “as the most underrated and least understood crypto project.”

The project received another boost with on-chain data provider DeFiLlama reporting that the Stellar network’s DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL) had hit US$52.85 million on November 26th. It had been hovering around US$21 million just a fortnight ago.

Outside of the top 50, TORN, the native token of the Tornado Cash, has been capturing bandwidth after a week that has seen the token rise by ~410% in the last 7 days. It currently trades for ~US$17.34.

Tornado Cash is a non-custodial swapping solution built on Ethereum. It seeks to improve transaction privacy by obfusticating the on-chain links between recipient and destination addresses. It utilizes Zero Knowledge Proof technology. TORN is the platform’s native governance token that can be used to vote on protocol upgrades and direction.

On November 26th, a Fifth Circle Appeals Court’s three-judge panel said the US Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) exceeded its authority when sanctioning Tornado Cash’s immutable smart contracts. This reversed a lower court’s decision. The appeals court said that while some Federal agencies have the power to take action against property, Tornado Cash’s immutable smart contracts were not property under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as they cannot be controlled and owned. This is a landmark judgment for Tornado Cash and potentially other protocols powered by smart contracts.