TIME touched 0.01 BTC on Bittrex for the first time on Sunday, after spending several weeks in the doldrums in the 0.006–0.007 range. In US dollars, that represents a healthy rise above its $5.4 million ICO raise — pushing $7 million.

It’s clear that the rules of the cryptocurrency world are shifting. Back in 2014, when the idea of ICOs first started to take off, people would throw money at anything and be rewarded with gains of three to ten times when they coin hit exchanges. Like as not it would be followed by a dump and obscurity, but speculators played those odds and felt increasingly entitled to their multiple ROI.

Bitcoin bull

As the crypto world matured, and as bitcoin entered another bull run, things started to change. It became harder to raise money at ICO — there were more projects, greater competition for much the same pool of funds, and investors started to filter the offerings more carefully. Anonymous devs, sketchy ANNs and shoddy white papers were treated as warning flags. And, as bitcoin rose and rose, new buyers didn’t suddenly come flocking in when a coin hit exchanges. In fact, many of those who had locked money up in an ICO sold at a loss in BTC terms in order to benefit from BTC’s rise against fiat. In the last few months it has become common for coins to trade below ICO after exchange listing, though there have been notable exceptions.

Bitcoin had a stellar bull run, hitting at all-time high of $1,336 (Bitfinex) just before the news broke that the Winklevoss ETF had been denied by regulators — thereby cutting off the huge injection of liquidity that the market had partially been pricing in. Uncertainty and volatility followed, with bitcoin’s ongoing trend now unclear.

What quite naturally happened after this was a race to buy underpriced altcoins that had been negatively impacted by bitcoin’s rise. Many alts have seen huge rises — notably Ethereum, which posted 500% gains in a month. The largest alts tend to see the most action, at least to begin with. After these have risen, profit-takers aim for the next tier of alts, and so on. Projects that have recently ended their ICOs or are smaller in terms of market cap are typically some way down the list.

Time for TIME

The fact that TIME rose 50% in a matter of a few hours should be of interest to holders who have had the patience to sit out the ups and downs that are an inevitable feature of the crypto markets. It indicates that sellers and new traders view it as a store of value promising enough to select over other alternatives. Some will have sold immediately after ICO and bought back in at a 30–50% discount; others will be learning about ChronoBank and dipping their toe in the water for the first time. With uncertainty around bitcoin’s near-term future looming, and lots of good news on the way for ChronoBank, we’re confident that $7 million market cap is still a low valuation for TIME.

One recent piece of good news is that TIME will now be trading on a major Chinese exchange, DABTC.com. This marks ChronoBank’s entry into a very large and dynamic market, and a wider economy in which the company has much to offer. ChronoBank is already broadening its ecosystem and is a short time away from launching the LaborX dapp and the first LH tokens, which will offer real-world advantages to their users.

For more information, visit www.ChronoBank.io.