The stellar price surged 28 percent after cryptoasset hedge fund manager and CNBC contributor Brian Kelly said that XLM could be the “next coin to surge.”

Stellar Price Leaps 28 Percent

The stellar price entered 2018 knee-deep in a breakneck 338 percent rally, rising as high as $0.92 on Jan. 4 after trading at $0.21 just one week prior. Ultimately, however, XLM failed to reach dollar parity, and the token endured a 53 percent correction that reduced its price below $0.44 on Jan. 11 during intraday trading.

On Friday, however, the stellar price leaped out of its week-long rut and began to scale the charts more quickly than any other top 10-cryptocurrency, save EOS. At present, the stellar price is trading at $0.68 on Bittrex, which represents a single-day increase of 28 percent and a 50 percent increase from its intraday low. Stellar now has a $12.4 billion market cap, which makes it the eighth-largest cryptocurrency according to this metric.

A plurality of stellar’s trading volume is located on Binance, a rapidly-expanding cryptocurrency exchange that reportedly registered 240,000 users in a single hour earlier in the week. At present, more than 43 percent of all XLM trading is concentrated on this exchange, where stellar’s token trades against BTC, ETH, and BNB. Bittrex and Poloniex comprise the majority of the remaining XLM volume.

XRP’s Tailwinds and a CNBC Pump

The surge coincided with a CNBC segment in which contributor Brian Kelly — who also founded the BKCM Digital Asset Fund — forecast on live television that stellar could be the “next coin to surge.”

However, the rally could also be partially tied to the 18 percent bounce that ripple received after money transfer service MoneyGram announced that it would adopt the XRP token in an open-ended trial.

While ripple and stellar are completely separate projects — apart from sharing a co-founder in Jed McCaleb — stellar has tended to ride ripple’s tailwinds in recent weeks, perhaps because it is (rightly or wrongly) viewed by some investors as a “poor man’s XRP.”

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