IOTA is one of the cryptocurrencies that has seen significant gains in recent times, despite the fact that most others have followed bitcoin’s lead and have taken nosedives in the last few weeks, to lower lows.
Iota has seen gains of about 9.73% over the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap, with a jaw-dropping 1042.02% increase in trading volume over the last day.
It currently trades at about $0.3047 and appears to have no plans of stopping its bullish momentum anytime soon.
Why Might This Pump Have Happened?
The most likely reason for this pump and the growing interest in IOTA as a network and as a cryptocurrency has to be the announcement of the lunch of its staging network on the 28th of this month. This event is set to happen less than 48 hours from now and is most responsible for the latest price action on IOTA.
This staging network was launched by the Iota foundation in 2021. It is also known as the shimmer network and is meant to be one that makes it easier to perform further upgrades on the Iota blockchain.
This shimmer network according to announcements, is meant to provide several benefits to the Iota community, including a tokenization framework for NFTÂ applications, feeless NFT trading and so much more.
Similar to the main Iota network, Shimmer is also a parallelized settlement layer, based on the DAG (directed acyclic graph) structure. It also features a higher L2 anchoring capacity than most of the other blockchains out there, explaining all the hype around it.
According to Dominik Scheiner, the co-founder, and chairperson of the Iota foundation, the foundation hasn’t launched any other token since 2015. Scheiner also went on to express excitement for the shimmer event set to happen on the 28th in a tweet today, the 26th of September.
Asides from the features already listed above on the shimmer network, shimmer also has a testing environment for further development on the original Iota network, and has the token SMR as its native cryptocurrency.
Shimmer is meant to be feeless, demanding no payment for transfers on and via the network. This means that all chains linked to the network can use shimmer as a feeless bridge for their activities.
Price Analysis On IOTA
Over the last week, the price of IOTA fluctuated inside a descending channel pattern below the 20, 50, 100, and 200-period moving averages on the daily timeframe. It traded at $0.25 and the bears appeared to be winning against the bulls
However, following the news of the shimmer network’s launch, the price of IOTA broke out from this pattern and started to trend upwards. The bulls appear to have won against the bears, bringing the price to where it currently sits.
Disclaimer: The author’s comments and recommendations are solely for educational and informative purposes. They do not represent any financial or investment advice. Always DYOR  (do your own research)
