Altcoins AVAX, OP, and WLD Climb As BNB Sets New All-time High

In brief

Binance Smart Chain’s native token BNB set a new all-time high of $858 as it surged 7% on Monday.
Other altcoins like Optimism, Injective, and Worldcoin have all seen gains, as Bitcoin dominance drops from a four year high last month.
Predictors on Myriad Markets believe that Ethereum is 68.5% likely to set a new all-time high by the end of the year, as it sits just 20% below its 2021 high of $4,878.

BNB set a new all-time high on Monday as it surged 7% on the day to a peak of $858, securing its place as the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

The cryptocurrency has since retreated to $851, up 6.6% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data. It follows the announcement that a drug company is set to buy up $700 million worth of BNB, as the latest in the corporate crypto treasury trend.

Alongside BNB’s all-time high, other altcoins have jumped in value.

Leading the way is Ethereum layer-2 Optimism, which has spiked 12.6% as the best-performing asset in the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap, per CoinGecko. Within the top 100, Avalanche has climbed 8.9%, Injective 5.4% and Worldcoin 3.7%.

BNB’s price surge

Earlier this year, Standard Chartered predicted that BNB, the native coin of the Binance Smart Chain ecosystem, would hit a $2,775 valuation by the end of 2028. Since its prediction, BNB has climbed 43% from $600 to its new all-time high of $858.

BNB’s price surge comes as Nasdaq-listed Windtree Therapeutics announced Friday that it will purchase up to $700 million of BNB. The company is jumping on the public crypto treasury trend that is sweeping the U.S., led by Michael Saylor’s Strategy.

Former CEO of Binance Changpeng “CZ” Zhao’s family office also announced that it would support the formation of a BNB Treasury Company earlier this month. Exactly how the family office YZi Labs will be “supporting” this company is still unclear.

Altcoins are broadly rising as traders anticipate a potential “altcoin season” following Bitcoin’s recent market dominance.

Ethereum has soared 60% over the past month to $3,885 and is now sitting just 20% from its all-time high of $4,878 set in 2021, according to CoinGecko. Predictors on Myriad Markets put a 68.5% chance on ETH setting a new all-time high by the end of the year.

As a result, users also believe that Bitcoin dominance is more likely to drop than not. Bitcoin dominance is the ratio of BTC’s market cap to the total market cap of cryptocurrencies; falling dominance is often a sign that altcoins are performing better. In June, Bitcoin dominance hit the highest it had been since early 2021 at 66% but has since fallen 8.5% to 60.43%, per TradingView.

(Disclosure: Myriad is a prediction market and engagement platform developed by DASTAN, parent company of an editorially independent Decrypt.)

The drop in dominance comes as most major altcoins like Solana, Hyperliquid, and Toncoin are seeing outsized gains when compared to Bitcoin, which is trading flat, up just 0.6% in the past day and 0.2% on the week.