NEAR Token Jumps Over 20% After UST Integration
Tokens of Near (NEAR) jumped 23% to $10.80 on Wednesday after an integration with decentralized payments network Terra was announced by developers on Tuesday night.
Terra’s UST tokens – stablecoins whose value is algorithmically pegged on a one-to-one basis with the U.S. dollar – are now supported on the high-speed Near network, developers said in the announcement.
NEAR traded at $8.6 on Tuesday night before the announcement. Tokens have traded in a tight range of $8.5 and $9.5 before breaking the latter resistance level on Wednesday morning, according to trading data from CoinGecko.
NEAR tokens crossed the $10 mark on Dec. 21 (TradingView)
Bringing Terra stablecoins to Near
Issuing UST on Near is a result of a partnership between Terra and decentralized finance (DeFi) tools NearPad and Rose. Developers say the move will facilitate the growth of UST to new ecosystems on both NEAR and Aurora, a bridge that moves assets between Ethereum and Near.
DeFi protocols rely on smart contracts instead of middlemen to provide financial services, such as lending, borrowing and trading, to users.
Terra has a growing user base and expanding to other blockchains helps create further use cases for both its blockchain and issued assets. On Tuesday, Terra became the world’s second-largest DeFi ecosystem and holds over $18 billion in value across various products and services, as reported.
NearPad and Rose will offer incentivized opportunities for users to deposit UST liquidity into the protocols, which can then be accessed by the wider NEAR community. NearPad is a Near-based decentralized exchange and market maker, while Rose is an Aurora-based stablecoin and wrapped assets swap product.
“Stablecoins like UST provide a simple interface to store value and interact with apps that need to use a stable unit of account,” Near co-founder Illia Polosukhin explained in a statement.
“Connecting NEAR and Terra ecosystems via Allbridge allows apps like Rose and NearPad to offer new ways to use stablecoins to both communities,” Polosukhin added.
In a separate development, UST became the world’s largest decentralized stablecoin on Tuesday with over $9 billion worth of coins in circulation. It is now supported on Ethereum, Terra, Binance Smart Chain and Secret network, as per CoinMarketCap.
Terra’s LUNA tokens have emerged as one of the top-performing cryptocurrencies in the past few months. They bumped 12% to over $95 on Wednesday morning, following a nearly month-long uptrend from the $41 level. The network has a market capitalization of $35 billion and is the ninth-largest blockchain in the world using the metric.
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Shaurya is an analyst/editor for CoinDesk's markets team in Asia.
