How Sustainable is the BitTorrent Token Rally?
Only a week ago, the new BitTorrent Tokens (BTT) sold out within minutes, and now their price is shooting up, having gained more than 800% since its sale on January 28, more than 120% in a few days in February and jumping by almost 60% in the past 24 hours (UTC 10:00 AM.) However, the questions still remains how sustainable this rally is, as it seems that the people using file-sharing systems BitTorrent and uTorrent are not all that fazed by the new token.
Part of the reason of the jump in price is the fact that since the token sale, a number of cryptocurrency exchanges have listed BTT for trading, including major players such as Binance and Upbit.
The increase in price, as well as the amount of trading volume (USD 582.6 million on nine active markets as of the time of writing) shows that the community is very interested in BTT. The obvious questions is – which community? Interestingly, it seems that BitTorrent and uTorrent users are hiding their interest in the new token successfully, as their forums lack any discussions pertaining to them. Instead, most of the interest comes from cryptocurrency traders, as social media is full of discussions about charts, graphs, and price movements.
“We decided to take a look at a place where the potential BTT users reside – in the BitTorrent and uTorrent forums, for example. Interestingly, there is not even a single mention of the new token, Tron, or the “BitTorrent Speed” project in general,” Ernesto Van der Sar, founder and editor-in-chief of TorrentFreak, a filesharing-focused media publication, wrote.
“This doesn’t mean that there’s no interest all, but it looks like most of the outreach is targeted at crypto investors instead of uTorrent and BitTorrent users. Perhaps that will change later, but it certainly seems odd. After all, these uTorrent users are the ones who are expected to actually use BTT as “currency,” he added.
Meanwhile, the token is traded in high volumes on both Binance and Upbit. However, Binance lists it as Bitcoin (BTC), Tether (USDT) and Binance Coin (BNB) trading pairs, while Upbit only trades BTT against the Korean Won (KRW).