The weekend has seen marginal gains for most crypto assets as total market capitalization claws back above $200 billion. Tezos has been the clear leader in terms of performance though as it tops $1 billion market cap and closes in on a top ten position.

Tezos Outperforming Crypto Markets

The good news is that there has been no big crypto dump over the weekend and most digital currencies have ground slightly higher. Bitcoin has continued consolidating as it pushes above $7,500 while the altcoins get dragged along with it. Only one has made any real progress over the past couple of days.

Tezos has just flipped Cardano as its market capitalization topped a billion dollars for the third time this year. Starting the weekend priced around $1.30 XTZ surged to hit an intraday high of $1.65 a couple of hours ago. The move equates to 27% over just two days making this altcoin the top performer by a large margin.

Daily volume for XTZ cranked from under $40 million to almost $70 million with Binance and OKEx taking the majority of the trade, followed by Coinbase Pro. Since the beginning of the year Tezos has made a whopping 250%, outperforming Bitcoin itself and most of the other altcoins which have dumped all of their 2019 gains.

The move was not lost on project supporters such as Kevin Mehrabi.

Tezos is in striking distance from the top 10, and after that…a fun grudge match with EOS. We're coming for you Danny boy! #tezos ? pic.twitter.com/I9trrteULO — Kevin Mehrabi (@KMehrabi) December 8, 2019

Naturally there is still a lot of crypto tribalism with many seeing this as an opportunity to bash rival blockchain platforms EOS and Ethereum.

Tezos Fundamentals

There could be a number of reasons for the bullish momentum for this crypto asset. Staking opportunities are now available on the world’s two leading crypto exchanges, Coinbase and Binance. Last week Binance announced that it would support zero fee Tezos staking and Coinbase is pushing education on XTZ by giving a little away to those that watch videos on it.

Just like rival platforms, development is still continuing with Tezos and there was a hint from Foundation CSO and council member Ryan Lackey that there may be joint funding for Ethereum Foundation teams.

“If any EF funded teams are looking to continue working on similar things in a cross-blockchain way, Tezos Foundation would potentially be interested in providing funding.”

A recent announcement also added that there were several layer 2 projects waiting to go live on mainnet soon. The TzStats Smart Contract API for Tezos is scheduled to go live on December 12. It will allow developers to write applications without getting buried in complex code.

At the moment Tezos is clearly leading things on crypto markets in terms of performance. Even Ethereum, which has just successfully undergone the Istanbul network upgrade, has not seen much movement today in terms of price. XTZ appears to be the crypto darling of the moment, but how long will the FOMO last?

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