Cardano has been one of the top-performing assets in 2021, rapidly climbing the list of largest assets by market cap as the launch date of its smart contracts approached. The day finally arrived about a month ago, and the project introduced smart contracts to its mainnet on September 12th.
Ever since, its ecosystem has been exploding with dApps, DeFi protocols, NFTs, and other blockchain-based products. One such product is AstroSwap, Cardano’s brand-new decentralized crypto exchange (DEX), which was recently launched with a coin of its own.
Its cryptocurrency, known as ASTRO, has been around for exactly a week now, going live on October 7th. With that in mind, we decided to look into the coin and see what its performance so far suggests.
ASTRO token’s first week
As mentioned, ASTRO is a very young coin, so there is not a lot of data to analyze as of yet. It launched on October 7th with a price of $0.2, and it soon skyrocketed, starting on late October 8th. The coin’s price went from $0.2 to a resistance at $0.5 in about 24 hours, marking this as its all-time high which has not been reached since.
Along the way, ASTRO hit a few more major resistances, but it also managed to identify a few supports. For example, before hitting an ATH, it hit barriers at $0.35 and $0.40. Each time when it encountered one of these barriers, it saw minor corrections, with the first one taking it to $0.30, and the second one to $0.36.
Both levels have served as strong supports that allowed it to quickly recover and progress further up. However, after hitting its new ATH, the coin dropped to $0.4, only to grow again and make another attempt at the resistance at $0.5. This time, however, ASTRO failed, and it corrected all the way down to $0.30. The fact that this level managed to stop its fall confirmed it as its strongest support so far.
ASTRO attempted one final surge to $0.50 early on October 11th, but it was rejected after reaching $0.47. This forced it back into a tight belt between $0.30 and $0.35, and these two levels have been holding it firmly ever since. For the past three days, it has fluctuated between them, never managing to breach the upper one or break the bottom one.
While this makes its price relatively stable for the time being, it is well known in the crypto industry that no coin sits still for too long, and it is likely only a matter of time before ASTRO breaks out, either up or down.
Details about AstroSwap
As mentioned, AstroSwap is one of Cardano’s latest DEXes, and the project’s IDO was held exclusively on ADAPad — Cardano’s launchpad meant to support upcoming projects that will be built on its blockchain. It should also be mentioned that the project is powered by WagyuSwap, and incubated by BlueZilla, which is good news for the future of ASTRO and the exchange that uses it.
The exchange itself made a major step by going through with the launch so soon, and its developers are now working on adding new features. Its website already announced the upcoming arrival of staking, swaps, as well as a lottery — a very popular way to engage in additional activities that many similar projects have started to incorporate lately.
AstroSwap’s total supply sits at 10 billion ASTRO, while the initial circulating supply was only 120 million tokens. Also, the token’s initial market cap was $120,000, although it should be mentioned that, at the time of writing, it sits at $73.7 million.
The coin’s volume has fluctuated between $9 million and $12 million during the more volatile portion of its short history. But, ever since its price started to stabilize, it has dropped to only $1.5 million to $2 million per day, as the community waits to see which way the price will go after it leaves the belt in which it is currently still stuck.
As for the project’s token allocation, the largest portion of the supply (45%) will be used for staking. The next largest chunk represents 12% of the supply, and this amount will go to the team. 10% went to the private sale, another 10% was used for the ecosystem, and another 10% was reserved for liquidity.
Project’s advisors got 6% of the supply, 4% went to the reserve, 2% was given to ADAPad, and finally, 1% will be used for airdrops.
The project’s community has also grown quite rapidly, with more than 71.3k followers on Twitter at the time of writing. Furthermore, the project started seeing great popularity recently, as it is trending on multiple platforms while being #1 on CoinGecko.
Another important thing to note is that AstroSwap announced via Twitter that staking will be available in less than 48 hours, with over $2 million ASTRO up for grab.
What is next for AstroSwap?
According to the project’s recently published roadmap, ASTRO has quite a few plans for the next three quarters.
Starting with Q4 2021, the project aimed to meet the Interstellar crew, launch its DEX, and bring staking and farming. Most of this was already done, with staking just about the be introduced.
Following this, the project will focus on new additions meant for Q1 2022, including the introduction of a cosmic lottery, New Frontiers Tokens (NFT) drop, and the release of its upcoming mobile app.
Lastly, in Q2 2022, the project aims to introduce the so-called cross-galactic trading, release prediction markets in beta, and “discover new life forms.”
Conclusion
AstroSwap is a new decentralized exchange that has potentially could become THE decentralized exchange for Cardano’s ecosystem. Like PancakeSwap on BSC or Uniswap on Ethereum, AstroSwap aims to become a go-to platform for Cardano, and judging by its rapid progress and great surge in popularity that it saw recently, there doesn’t seem to be much in its way, preventing it from achieving this goal.
AstroSwap (ASTRO) can currently be purchased on Gate.io.
In any case, it will be interesting to follow the development of the project and see how far it will grow before the end of the year, as well as later on, in 2022 and beyond.
