EOS rockets 44% higher ahead of its airdrop

It certainly has been a positive day of trade for the crypto market, with strong gains being seen across the board.





This has lifted the value of the entire market by almost 3% since this morning to US$277.9 billion according to Coin Market Cap.





Key drivers of this strong gain have been the performances of the bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Ripple (XRP) prices.





Over the last 24 hours the three largest cryptocurrencies in the world have gained 1.7%, 4.6%, and 9.5%, respectively.









While these gains are undoubtedly strong, they pale in comparison to the gain being made by EOS (EOS) which is up a remarkable 44% to US$8.79 since this time yesterday.





Incredibly, this gain means that EOS has now overtaken Litecoin (LTC) to become the fifth-largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalisation of US$6.9 billion.





The EOS price has been going nuts ahead of a planned “airdrop” on April 15.





In the computer gaming world airdrops occur when a plane flies over the map and drops a crate containing various supplies for players.





The same thing happens now and then in the cryptocurrency world, except instead of supplies, free tokens are dropped into users’ digital wallets.





Details are a little hard to come by on the airdrop, but according to Cryptocalendar:





“75% of eosDAC tokens (900,000,000) have been allocated for an airdrop to EOS token holders. All EOS token holders holding over 100 tokens at the end of Day 300 of the EOS crowdsale (April 15) will receive 1 eosDAC token for each EOS token that they hold, these tokens will be transferred directly into their Ethereum (ERC20 compatible) wallet.”





This has led to sizeable demand for EOS, taking the volume traded over the last 24 hours up to a massive US$2.35 billion.





While free money is of course hard to refuse, I would caution against rushing into this one. While users buying in now should receive their eosDAC tokens on April 15, there’s no guarantee that these tokens would offset any declines brought about by a post-airdrop sell-off should one occur.



