The little-known smart contract platform Chain (XCN) is attracting attention after its native XCN spiked in price and briefly leaped into the top 40 list of the most valuable cryptoassets by market capitalization. Shortly after, however, the token dumped in the market to trade at its lowest point in nearly a week.
As of Wednesday at 09:23 UTC, Chain’s XCN token is trading at USD 0.0848, down 13% for the past 24 hours, 1.2% for the week, and 24.6% for the past 30 days.
At the time of writing, the token is ranked as the 50th most valuable cryptocurrency. The most active exchanges for trading in the token were Huobi Global and , which combined made up more than 60% of trading volume over the past 24 hours.
Today’s market moves come after an announcement from Chain on April 23 that the Chain Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) has gone live, with native staking and governance modules now said to be ready.
“The initial proposals to set rewards and make the entire protocol fully decentralized have successfully passed and the DAO is now fully in the hands of XCN holders,” the announcement said.
It added that the Chain Governance now controls the Chain DAO Treasury, which holds 10bn XCN tokens (worth some USD 840m at current prices). Only users who stake their XCN tokens in the Chain Staking smart contract will be able to vote on governance issues on the platform, the announcement said.
Meanwhile, the project also announced in April that it had partnered with Alameda Research, the parent company of crypto exchange FTX, as its “primary cryptocurrency market maker.”
Despite being little known among retail crypto users, the Chain network has been involved in the crypto space since 2014, although mainly in the area of permissioned, close-ended blockchains for financial institutions.
Permissioned blockchains differ from decentralized and permissionless blockchains like Bitcoin (BTC) in that a central party decides who gets permission to perform activities on the network.
Chain’s main product, a software package known as Sequence, allows companies to manage their financial assets in a token format on private ledgers, with support soon to be added for interoperability with public blockchain networks.
Chain is led by Deepak Thapliyal, an active non-fungible token (NFT) collector who made headlines after he purchased an NFT from the popular CryptoPunk collection for ETH 8,000 (USD 16.4m) in February this year, worth some USD 23.7m at the time.