The Graph's Token Doubles in 24 Hours

Forget Bitcoin. Forget the Fed. Forget inflation.

The big story in the markets today was a data ecosystem known as The Graph Network. GRT, The Graph’s native token, almost doubled on Tuesday, according to The Defiant Terminal.

It was the best performance in the top 100 crypto assets.

GRT’s 24-hour price action. Source: The Defiant Terminal

Not everyone was caught by surprise — a pseudonymous trader, who goes by ButWhenMoon, told The Defiant they opened a trade on GRT in mid-January when the token was at $0.08 before closing it out when the token hit $0.18 on Tuesday. GRT has a market cap of $1.6B.

Big Partnerships

“The chart basically aligned with the chatter around ‘big partnerships coming’ rhetoric in their socials,” the trader said when asked what caused them to open a position in GRT.

The Graph is an indexing protocol that helps devs work with protocols such as Ethereum. Users can build and integrate APIs, or subgraphs, which are sets of functions that help devs create computer applications and let programs talk to each other.

Huge Moves

While it’s always hard to discern what’s behind such huge moves in assets, The Graph announced support last month for four new blockchains: Arbitrum, Avalanche, Celo, and Optimism.

Then came a report from Messari released on Feb. 3, a crypto-focused data and research firm, which showed 25% quarter-over-quarter growth on subgraphs. That may have also contributed to GRT’s upward price action. Users pay for access to data in GRT.

Usage of The Graph is surging. Source: Messari.

The other tokens in the top five gainers on the day include AGIX, and FET — SingularityNET and Fetch.ai, the projects behind those tokens, are positioning themselves in the artificial intelligence (AI) space, which has been red hot since ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI, exploded in popularity late last year.

GRT may have picked up steam as part of an “AI token rally.” Many Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers have posted about “AI tokens” and included GRT in the list.

It may be more than hype however, as influencers like Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at the venture firm Dragonfly, see crypto as a natural fit with AI. The VC sees AIs as needing to hold assets, somewhat like people do.

“Non-human agents will prefer crypto, because it is built for them,” Qureshi tweeted in early January.

Major Tech Trend

It’s possible that non-human agents may need GRT to query The Graph’s data as AI develops.

It certainly doesn’t hurt to be associated with a major tech trend — in 2017, adding the name “blockchain” led to multiple publicly traded companies’ stocks more than doubling.

Nick Hansen, the host of a popular podcast on The Graph called GRTiQ, told The Defiant that the players in the data ecosystem were not generally focused on the price action.

“We’ve interviewed and spoken with a lot of builders working in this community,” he said. “None of them are paying attention to what’s happening in the market or on [Crypto Twitter]. They all seem very focused on building and there is a lot of activity in The Graph community right now.”

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The Defiant

GRT and AI-adjacent tokens aren’t the only hot assets. SAND, the token of The Sandbox, a player in the metaversal space, jumped over 25% on the news of a partnership with Saudi Arabia’s Digital Government Authority.

IMX, the token for ImmutableX, a Layer 2 blockchain and gaming studio, rounded out the top five gainers among the largest 100 digital assets with a 25% jump of its own.

Markets are up overall — BTC, ETH, and BNB are all rallying this week, according to The Defiant Terminal.

Equities indexes are notching green days as well — the S&P 500 climbed 1.3% Tuesday and the Nasdaq 100 gained 1.9%.