While the remarkable rebound in the Bitcoin (BTC) price has taken a lot of the crypto headlines over the last couple of weeks, it hasn't been the best performing coin.
During that time the real highlight in my opinion has been the performance of the Stellar (XLM) price.
At the time of writing the fledgling alt coin is up 13% since this time yesterday to 33.67 U.S. cents. This latest gain means that the price of Stellar, also known as Lumens, is up a whopping 85% from 18.2 U.S. cents just two weeks ago.
As result of this strong gain, Stellar has a market capitalisation of over US$6.3 billion, making it the sixth largest coin ahead of Litecoin (LTC) and behind EOS (EOS).
Why has XLM been on fire?
The Stellar price has been on an upward trajectory since early last week when CoinBase announced that it was one of five coins that it was considering adding to its trading platform.
Traders appear to be betting that the addition of the coin on the largest crypto exchange in the United States will create a significant increase in demand.
According to the release, CoinBase is looking into adding Stellar along with Cardano (ADA), Basic Attention Token (BAT), Zcash (ZEC) and 0x (ZRX).
The addition of Stellar and Cardano would mean that CoinBase has six of the top eight coins available to be traded on its platform. Just Ripple (XRP) and EOS (EOS) would be missing from its offering.
In addition to the CoinBase news, the technology behind Stellar is growing in popularity. Singapore-based money transfer company TransferTo announced that it has partnered with Stellar to enhance the way in which money is transferred across borders.
Under this collaboration, TransferTo believes that financial institutions and partners of both Stellar.org and TransferTo will "benefit from the combined network coverage and be able to leverage new technologies to send and receive money more efficiently to more than 70 countries."
What next for the Stellar price?
Whilst I'm a big fan of its technology and believe it could have a bright future ahead of it, it's impossible to know whether the Stellar price has peaked now. Because of this, I think the prudent thing to do is to watch on from the safety of the sidelines.
