While bitcoin and most alternative cryptocurrencies are slowly recovering from the latest market sell-off, the price of one particular crypto that was once the star of the space continues to fall and is now valued at just a fraction of where it was in May.
Internet computer’s (ICP) price was changing hands at $34.63, down 0.44% in the 24 hours leading up to press time, according to Messari. The token’s value, according to TradingView, was once as high as around $630 when the ICP/USD pair went live on the U.S.-based crypto exchange Coinbase Pro on May 10.
By comparison, bitcoin, the No. 1 cryptocurrency by market capitalization, was up 4.71% in the past 24 hours and trading at $34,939.80, according to CoinDesk 20 data. Most crypto assets on CoinDesk 20 were higher at the time of writing.
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From the start ICP’s price had a wild run when several exchanges listed it including Coinbase, Binance, Huobi and OKEx. In just one day, May 10, the price went from $630 to as low as $250 before slowly coming back to around $400. The decline to the current $34.63 has continued since then.
Why?
“The fact that the token was launched during such a boisterous [market] likely pushed initial valuation into upper range of expectations,” Denis Vinokourov, head of research at Synergia Capital, told CoinDesk.
“With prices retreating across the industry, the most recently hyped projects have been among those hardest hit,” added Rick Delaney, senior analyst at OKEx Insights. “In ICP’s case, it seems the harder and faster it pumps, the more severe the dump.”
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The Dfinity Foundation, creator of the governance token of The Internet Computer, claims ICP makes every facet of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications “uncensorable.” The project raised more than $120 million, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Polychain Capital, Scalar Capital, CoinFund, Multicoin Capital and Greycroft Partners.
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The platform’s layer 1 protocol was intended to roll out a decentralized public network that would become an “extension of the internet.” Difinity Foundation has been working on the project since 2016.
The most recent update from the Dfinity Foundation, came on June 21, introducing a toolkit to increase the security of ICP tokens.
“As great as the tech is on paper, it is, to a large extent, unproven,” Vinokourov said. “Also, there is little evidence of teams actively building on ‘The Internet Computer.’”
